Genetic and cellular architecture of breast cancer risk across ancestries

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 200 susceptibility loci, but most studies are dominated by European and East Asian populations. METHODS: We analyzed breast cancer GWAS summary statistics from African (AFR), East Asian (EAS), European (EUR), and Hispanic/Latina (H/L) samples (159,297 cases and 212,102 controls). We estimated logit-scale SNP-based heritability, polygenicity, and cross-ancestry genetic correlation, partitioned heritability across functional annotations, and integrated GWAS results with the Tabula Sapiens single-cell atlas using scDRS+. RESULTS: The logit-scale heritability of breast cancer ranged from h2=0.47 (SE = 0.07) in EAS to AFR h2=0.61 (SE = 0.10), with no significant differences across ancestries (p = 0.63). The model-implied number of non-null susceptibility SNPs in the sparse normal-mixture effect-size model also varied from 4,446 (SE = 3,100) in EAS to 8,308 (SE = 2,751) in AFR, but differences were not significant across ancestries (p = 0.55). Cross-sample genetic correlations varied, with the strongest correlation between EUR and EAS (ρ=0.79, SE = 0.08) and weakest between AFR and H/L (ρ=0.26, SE = 0.24). Regulatory annotations were enriched for breast cancer heritability across samples. Integration with single-cell expression profiles implicated ancestry-shared associations with innate immune, secretory epithelial, and stromal cell types. CONCLUSION: These results indicate substantial cross-ancestry sharing of breast cancer polygenic architecture, highlight a consistent contribution of regulatory variation, and identify convergent cellular contexts that motivate functional follow-up and inform expectations for the transferability and attainable performance of common-variant risk prediction across populations.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. JNCI Cancer Spectrum, 2026 · DOI ↗