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Nature Reviews Cancer 5, 977–985 (1 December 2005) | doi:10.1038/nrc1754

A candidate gene approach to searching for low-penetrance breast and prostate cancer genes

Most cases of breast and prostate cancer are not associated with mutations in known high-penetrance genes, indicating the involvement of multiple low-penetrance risk alleles. Studies that have attempted to identify these genes have met with limited success. The National Cancer Institute Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium ? a pooled analysis of multiple large cohort studies with a total of more than 5,000 cases of breast cancer and 8,000 cases of prostate cancer ? was therefore initiated. The goal of this consortium is to characterize variations in approximately 50 genes that mediate two pathways that are associated with these cancers ? the steroid-hormone metabolism pathway and the insulin-like growth factor signalling pathway ? and to associate these variations with cancer risk.