World Cancer Report Updates webinar series: Polygenic Scores for Cancer Prevention

The sixth instalment in the World Cancer Report Updates webinar series will be broadcast live on Wednesday 2 March 2022 at 17:00 CET. The topic of the webinar will be Polygenic Scores for Cancer Prevention. The event, which will last approximately one hour, will include two presentations and a question and answer session. Dr James McKay, Deputy Head of the Genomic Epidemiology Branch at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), will chair the event.

In the first presentation, Dr Nilanjan Chatterjee, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, USA, will provide a brief overview of emerging opportunities and discuss some limitations of the use of polygenic scores for developing risk-stratified approaches to cancer prevention. He will describe results from a recent study on the validation of a breast cancer risk prediction model that integrates polygenic scores with other established risk factors and will provide an assessment of the potential clinical utility of the model for breast cancer prevention.

In the second presentation, Dr Linda Kachuri, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California San Francisco and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University, USA, will present findings from the largest genome-wide association study of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and will demonstrate how using a polygenic score to correct PSA values can improve the clinical utility by reducing overdiagnosis and unnecessary testing and increasing detection of aggressive disease.

The World Cancer Report Updates webinar series aims to provide new perspectives or present new research, to complement the large variety of educational resources based on selected content of World Cancer Report. These educational resources are freely accessible from the World Cancer Report Updates learning platform, which was developed with the support of and in collaboration with the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO).

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