Kristin A Rand, Chi Song, Eric Dean, Daniel J Serie, Karen Curtin, Xin Sheng, Donglei Hu, Carol Ann Huff, Leon Bernal-Mizrachi, Michael H Tomasson, Sikander Ailawadhi, Seema Singhal, Karen Pawlish, Edward S Peters, Cathryn H Bock, Alex Stram, David J Van Den Berg, Christopher K Edlund, David V Conti, Todd Zimmerman, Amie E Hwang, Scott Huntsman, John Graff, Ajay Nooka, Yinfei Kong, Silvana L Pregja, Sonja I Berndt, William J Blot, John Carpten, Graham Casey, Lisa Chu, W Ryan Diver, Victoria L Stevens, Michael R Lieber, Phyllis J Goodman, Anselm J M Hennis, Ann W Hsing, Jayesh Mehta, Rick A Kittles, Suzanne Kolb, Eric A Klein, Cristina Leske, Adam B Murphy, Barbara Nemesure, Christine Neslund-Dudas, Sara S Strom, Ravi Vij, Benjamin A Rybicki, Janet L Stanford, Lisa B Signorello, John S Witte, Christine B Ambrosone, Parveen Bhatti, Esther M John, Leslie Bernstein, Wei Zheng, Andrew F Olshan, Jennifer J Hu, Regina G Ziegler, Sarah J Nyante, Elisa V Bandera, Brenda M Birmann, Sue A Ingles, Michael F Press, Djordje Atanackovic, Martha J Glenn, Lisa A Cannon-Albright, Brandt Jones, Guido Tricot, Thomas G Martin, Shaji K Kumar, Jeffrey L Wolf, Sandra L Deming Halverson, Nathaniel Rothman, Angela R Brooks-Wilson, S Vincent Rajkumar, Laurence N Kolonel, Stephen J Chanock, Susan L Slager, Richard K Severson, Nalini Janakiraman, Howard R Terebelo, Elizabeth E Brown, Anneclaire J De Roos, Ann F Mohrbacher, Graham A Colditz, Graham G Giles, John J Spinelli, Brian C Chiu, Nikhil C Munshi, Kenneth C Anderson, Joan Levy, Jeffrey A Zonder, Robert Z Orlowski, Sagar Lonial, Nicola J Camp, Celine M Vachon, Elad Ziv, Daniel O Stram, Dennis J Hazelett, Christopher A Haiman, Wendy Cozen

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in European populations have identified genetic risk variants associated with multiple myeloma (MM). We performed association testing of common variation in eight regions in 1,264 MM patients and 1,479 controls of European ancestry (EA) and 1,305 MM patients and 7,078 controls of African ancestry (AA) and conducted a meta-analysis to localize the signals, with epigenetic annotation used to predict functionality. We found that variants in 7p15.3, 17p11.2, 22q13.1 were statistically significantly (p<0.05) associated with MM risk in AAs and EAs and the variant in 3p22.1 was associated in EAs only. In a combined AA-EA meta-analysis, variation in five regions (2p23.3, 3p22.1, 7p15.3, 17p11.2, 22q13.1) was statistically signficantly associated with MM risk. In 3p22.1, the correlated variants clustered within the gene body of ULK4. Correlated variants in 7p15.3 clustered around an enhancer at the 3' end of the CDCA7L transcription termination site. A missense variant at 17p11.2 (rs34562254, Pro251Leu, OR=1.32, p=2.93x10-7) in TNFRSF13B, encodes a lymphocyte-specific protein in the tumor necrosis factor receptor family that interacts with the NF-κB pathway. SNPs correlated with the index signal in 22q13.1 cluster around the promoter and enhancer regions of CBX7. We found that reported MM susceptibility regions contain risk variants important across populations supporting the use of multiple racial/ethnic groups with different underlying genetic architecture to enhance the localization and identification of putatively functional alleles. A subset of reported risk loci for multiple myeloma have consistent affects across populations and are likely to be functional.