The large-scale Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS) has published over a dozen coordinated papers detailing the genetic and environmental bases of breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers.
The papers report over 70 new susceptibility loci for these 3 hormone-related cancers, and will help clarify the underlying mechanisms of carcinogenesis and develop clinically relevant cancer prediction models.
Almost half of the 70 known loci associated with overall breast cancer risk in women of European ancestry were also associated with risk in east Asian women. In addition, certain environmental factors, specifically alcohol consumption, seem to modify the association between some common variants and breast cancer risk.