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Article History

Received: 27 October 2019

Revised: 12 February 2020

Accepted: 19 February 2020

First Online: 11 March 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Informed consent was obtained from all study participants. This study was approved by the institutional review boards at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston, MA, USA), and those of participating registries as required. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

: Not applicable.

: The data sets used and/or analysed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

: A.T.C. previously served as a consultant for Bayer Healthcare and Pfizer Inc. J.A.M. has also served as an advisor/consultant to Ignyta, Array Pharmaceutical and Cota. R.N. is currently employed by Pfizer Inc.; she contributed to this study before she became an employee of Pfizer Inc. C.S.F. previously served as a consultant for Agios, Bain Capital, Bayer, Celgene, Dicerna, Five Prime Therapeutics, Gilead Sciences, Eli Lilly, Entrinsic Health, Genentech, KEW, Merck, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Inc., Sanofi, Taiho and Unum Therapeutics. C.S.F. also serves as a director for CytomX Therapeutics and owns unexercised stock options for CytomX and Entrinsic Health. M.G. was on an advisory board for AstraZeneca and receives research funding from Bristol-Myers Squibb. S.O. is an Editorial Board Member of the British Journal of Cancer. This study was not funded by any of these commercial entities. No other conflicts of interest exist. The other authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

: This work was supported by U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants (P01 CA87969 to M.J. Stampfer; UM1 CA186107 to M.J. Stampfer; P01 CA55075 to W.C. Willett; UM1 CA167552 to W.C. Willett; U01 CA167552 to W.C. Willett and L.A. Mucci; P50 CA127003 to C.S.F.; R01 CA118553 to C.S.F.; R01 CA169141 to C.S.F.; R01 CA137178 to A.T.C.; K24 DK098311 to A.T.C.; R35 CA197735 to S.O.; R01 CA151993 to S.O.; K07 CA190673 to R.N.; K07 CA188126 to X.Z.); by Cancer Research UK’s Grand Challenge Initiative (C10674/A27140 to M.G. and S.O.); by Nodal Award (2016-02) from the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center (to S.O.); by the Stand Up to Cancer Colorectal Cancer Dream Team Translational Research Grant (SU2C-AACR-DT22-17 to C.S.F. and M.G.), administered by the American Association for Cancer Research, a scientific partner of SU2C; by grants from the Project P Fund, The Friends of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Bennett Family Fund and the Entertainment Industry Foundation through National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance. K.H. was supported by fellowship grants from the Uehara Memorial Foundation and the Mitsukoshi Health and Welfare Foundation. K.K. and K.A. were supported by grants from Overseas Research Fellowship from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP2017-775 to K.K.; JP201860083 to K.A.). P.L. and Y.C. were supported by scholarship grants from Chinese Scholarship Council. M.G. was supported by a Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Career Development Award. A.T.C. is a Stuart and Suzanne Steele MGH Research Scholar. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors, and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.