Lung Tissue-based Transcriptome-Wide Association Study Uncovers Susceptibility Genes and Drug Targets Underlying Lung Cancer Risk

For meta-analysis, we used lung cancer GWAS summary statistics of a published GWAS meta-analysis of lung cancer and publicly available GWAS summary statistics from three large biobanks, including the UK Biobank, FinnGen release version 12, and the Million Veteran Project. All these summary statistics were from European descendants. We excluded rare variants with MAF < 1%. Allele frequencies of palindromic variants were compared with those of individuals of European ancestry from 1000GP. These palindromic variants with MAF of > 40% and an allele frequency difference of > 20% were further removed. We used METAL software to combine results from the above studies using the fixed-effect inverse variance weighted method. Additionally, we performed GWAS meta-analysis of the three main histological subtypes: LUAD, LUSC, and SCLC.