Low-penetrance susceptibility to hematological malignancy

There is increasing evidence for inherited genetic susceptibility to cancer, and much of this is thought to be caused by the co-inheritance of multiple low risk alleles. Recent developments have allowed the search for this class of susceptibility allele to be conducted on a genome-wide basis. Here we discuss the impact genome-wide association studies are having on our understanding of two of the major hematological malignancies, chronic lymphocytic leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia.