Tumor break load quantitates structural variant-associated genomic instability with biological and clinical relevance across cancers

While structural variants (SVs) are a clear sign of genomic instability, they have not been systematically quantified per patient since declining costs have only recently enabled large-scale profiling. Therefore, the biological and clinical impact of high numbers of SVs in patients is unknown. We introduce tumor break load (TBL), defined as the sum of unbalanced SVs, as a measure for SV-associated genomic instability. Using pan-cancer data from TCGA, PCAWG, and CCLE, we show that a high TBL is associated with significant changes in gene expression in 26/31 cancer types that consistently involve upregulation of DNA damage repair and downregulation of immune response pathways. Patients with a high TBL show a higher risk of recurrence and shorter median survival times for 5/15 cancer types. Our data demonstrate that TBL is a biologically and clinically relevant feature of genomic instability that may aid patient prognostication and treatment stratification. For the datasets analyzed in this study, TBL has been made available in cBioPortal.