Background
The
DICER1
syndrome is an autosomal dominant tumor‐predisposition disorder associated with pleuropulmonary blastoma, a rare pediatric lung cancer. Somatic missense variation in “hotspot” codons in the RNaseIIIb domain (E1705, D1709, G1809, D1810, E1813) is observed in
DICER1
‐associated tumors. Previously, we found the prevalence of germline pathogenic
DICER1
variation in the general population is 1:10,600. In this study, we investigated the prevalence of pathogenic
DICER1
germline variation in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA; 32 adult cancer types; 9,173 exomes) and the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatment (TARGET; two pediatric cancer types; 175 exomes) cohorts.
Methods
All datasets were annotated and binned into four categories: pathogenic, likely pathogenic, variant of unknown significance, or likely benign.
Results
The prevalence of
DICER1
pathogenic variants was 1:4,600 in TCGA. A single participant with a uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma harbored two pathogenic germline
DICER1
(hotspot and splice‐donor) variants, and a single participant with a rectal adenocarcinoma harbored a germline
DICER1
stop‐gained variant. In the smaller TARGET dataset, we observed no pathogenic germline variants.
Conclusion
This is the largest comprehensive analysis of
DICER1
pathogenic variation in adult and pediatric cancer populations using publicly available data. The observation of germline
DICER1
variation with uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma merits additional investigation.