Long-term survivors of childhood cancer are a clinical population with differential environmental exposures (e.g., cancer treatments, including specific chemotherapies and radiation therapy) and greater risk for serious chronic health conditions than the general population. This researcher is developing novel statistical approaches to construct new genetic predictors among long-term survivors of childhood cancer to improve risk prediction of late effects of cancer therapy, specifically involving polygenic risk scores that integrate summary statistics from large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and genome-wide scale gene-by-treatment interaction association testing.
The ongoing research projects involve genetic analyses with array-based/sequencing-based genotype data from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS), a multi-institutional cohort study of long-term childhood cancer survivors with ~30,000 participants; the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study (SJLIFE), a single-institution cohort study of clinically-assessed long-term childhood cancer survivors with ~6,000 participants; and the UK Biobank Study (UKBB; application 64978), a UK registry-based cohort study with ~500,000 participants recruited at ages 40-70 years. Large-scale epigenetic datasets for some of these studies are also anticipated (SJLIFE/CCSS) in the near future.