Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies multiple lung cancer susceptibility loci in never-smoking Asian women

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of lung cancer in Asian never-smoking women have previously identified six susceptibility loci associated with lung cancer risk. To further discover new susceptibility loci, we imputed data from four GWAS of Asian non-smoking female lung cancer (6877 cases and 6277 controls) using the 1000 Genomes Project (Phase 1 Release 3) data as the reference and genotyped additional samples (5878 cases and 7046 controls) for possible replication. In our meta-analysis, three new loci achieved genome-wide significance, marked by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs7741164 at 6p21.1 (per-allele odds ratio (OR) = 1.17; P = 5.8 × 10-13), rs72658409 at 9p21.3 (per-allele OR = 0.77; P = 1.41 × 10-10) and rs11610143 at 12q13.13 (per-allele OR = 0.89; P = 4.96 × 10-9). These findings identified new genetic susceptibility alleles for lung cancer in never-smoking women in Asia and merit follow-up to understand their biological underpinnings.