Interestingly, in an analysis of the true positive rates to identify MSS hypermutant CRC, Lee et al. predicted the best performing three individual genes were PTEN, ATM and ATR. Since BRCA1/2 are not included on the Ion AmpliSeqTM Comprehensive Cancer Panel, we could not confirm this in our dataset of early T stage CRC, so we examined their frequencies in TCGA data (Supplementary Figure S3) and found the mutational frequencies of BRCA2 and BRCA1 were only 30% and 20%, respectively, in hypermutant early T stage CRC. This evidence concerns the gene ATR and cancer.