Next Steps With the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study

Zhaoming Wang, PhD, bioinformatics scientist, Department of Computational Biology, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, discusses the next steps of the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study.

Investigators are using the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study whole-genome sequencing data in an effort to evaluate the monogenic and polygenic associations to subsequent breast cancer risk in survivors of childhood cancer. The goal of this work is to identify the role of genetic variants and treatment exposures to subsequent risk of breast cancer in adult survivors of childhood cancer.

The central life cohort is expanding, adding at least 1000 more survivors to help refine and validate the study, Wang says. Additionally, there is a multicenter cohort called Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, in which at least 30 different centers have participated nationwide. The whole-exome sequencing of the 5700 patients is complete, so the next step is to bring these data together. That is one of the future directions that investigators are going to pursue.