In the past year the excitement about genetic susceptibility has reached fever pitch with the opportunity not only to look at candidate genes under the lamp post so to speak, but also to interrogate the entire genome for genome-wide association studies utilizing the haplotype tagging of SNPs, the molecular epidemiology infrastructure that was developed here at NCI, and the consortial arrangements that have been made with the extramural community. A strategy called CGEMS, which stands for Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility, has been developed with an initial focus on prostate and breast cancer. And we’re planning soon to move to pancreas cancer and to lung cancer, lymphoma, bladder cancer and others for which we have specimens as well as epidemiologic data. The studies are led by Stephen Chanock and Giles Thomas and a wonderful staff at the Core Genotyping Facility together with a team approach that involves many others across NCI, including those in DCCPS and DCP and as well as the extramural research community. Using Illumina technology, the initial scan of 540K tag-SNPs has involved over a thousand cases, each of prostate and breast cancers and an equal number of controls. In what is called here the “column of truth”, a stepwise progression of follow up and replication studies narrows the number of SNPs that can be significantly related to cancer risk. The analytical challenges have been great, and we’re lucky to have a group of outstanding statisticians to guide our efforts. At the end of the process a relatively small number of genetic loci remain for re-sequencing and for functional and other studies that will identify the causal variants and pathways, including those that may be related to the genomic alterations that are found in tumor tissue that is collected in some of our studies. However, the downstream work goes far beyond what our division and the Genotyping Facility can accomplish, and we’re hopeful that the basic and clinical scientists in the intramural program will see some fresh opportunities to advance our understanding of cancer etiology and biology, and enhance the prospects for new preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions.