Prioritizing context-specific genetic risk mechanisms in 11 solid cancers

Abstract Background While genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of cancer-associated genetic variants, the specific biological contexts where these variants exert their effects remain largely unknown. We aimed to prioritize context-specific genetic risk mechanisms for 11 solid cancers at both genome-wide and single-variant resolutions. Methods We integrated cancer GWAS summary statistics from European ancestry samples (avg. n = 47 856 cases) with 1473 context-specific annotations representing candidate cis-regulatory elements. For genome-wide analysis, we applied cell-type fine-mapping (CT-FM), a method that jointly models heritability enrichments across annotations to select likely disease-relevant biological contexts. Following functionally informed fine-mapping to identify high-confidence causal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), we used CT-FM-SNP to identify relevant contexts for individual variants. A combined SNP-to-gene framework was applied to construct putative {regulatory SNP-context-gene-cancer} quadruplets. Results Stratified LD score regression analysis identified 141 annotations showing significant heritability enrichment (false discovery rate, q ≤ 0.05). CT-FM prioritized 4 high-confidence biological contexts (posterior inclusion probability ≥  0.5): mammary luminal epithelial cells for overall and estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer, the VCaP (Vertebral-Cancer of the Prostate) epithelial cell line for prostate cancer, and bulk tumor tissue contexts for colorectal and renal cancers. Variant-level analysis of hundreds of putatively causal SNPs aligned with these findings and identified additional high-confidence contexts for ER-negative breast, endometrial, lung, and bladder cancers. A total of 489 putative regulatory quadruplets were constructed, proposing specific molecular hypotheses underlying the observed GWAS signals. Conclusion These findings advance our understanding of genetic susceptibility to different cancers. Future work in larger, more diverse GWAS, coupled with more comprehensive annotation atlases, is essential to expand upon and validate our results.