In this report, we sought to expand our understanding of etiologic heterogeneity across breast cancer subtypes, by applying the two-stage polytomous logistic regression methodology to a large study population from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC) for detailed characterization of risk associations with 173 breast cancer risk variants identified by GWAS[6, 7] by tumor subtypes defined by ER, PR, HER2 and tumor grade. The gene discussed is ERBB2; the disease is breast carcinoma.