Although evidence suggests an importance of genetic factors in the development of breast cancer in Taiwanese (ethnic Chinese) women, including a high incidence of early-onset and secondary contralateral breast cancer, a major breast cancer predisposition gene, BRCA1, has not been well studied in this population. In fact, the carcinogenic impacts of many genetic variants of BRCA1 are unknown and classified as variants of uncertain significance (VUS). It is therefore important to establish a method to characterize the BRCA1 VUSs and understand their role in Taiwanese breast cancer patients. Accordingly, we developed a multimodel assessment strategy consisting of a prescreening portion and a validated functional assay to study breast cancer patients with early-onset, bilateral or familial breast cancer. We found germ-line BRCA1 mutations in 11.1% of our cohort and identified one novel missense mutation, c.5191C4A. Two genetic variants were initially classified as VUSs (c.1155C4T and c.5191C4A). c.1155C4T is not predicted to be deleterious in the prescreening portion of our assessment strategy. c.5191C4A, on the other hand, causes p.T1691K, which is predicted to have high deleterious probability because of significant structural alteration, a high deleterious score in the predictive programs and, clinically, triple negative characteristics in breast tumors. This mutant is confirmed by transcription activation and yeast growth-inhibition assays. In conclusion, we show as high a prevalence of germ-line BRCA1 mutation in high-risk Taiwanese patients as in Caucasians and demonstrate a useful strategy for studying BRCA1 VUSs. Keywords: BRCA1; breast cancer; structure modeling; variants of uncertain significance INTRODUCTION Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers and is the leading cause of cancer-related death in women throughout the world. Interestingly, the prevalence of breast cancer is lower in Taiwanese (ethnic Chinese) populations than in Caucasian populations, 1 and the epidemiological patterns are different in the two patient groups. First, the median age of breast cancer patients in Taiwan (45-49 years) is lesser than that in Western countries (70-74 years). 2 Second, a rise in incidence has been observed consistently in Asian countries, 2-4 and one age-period-cohort analysis showed that the increase in breast cancer incidence was largely due to a rise in young patients. 2 Third, a longitudinal cohort revealed that young breast cancer patients in