A big federal research project aimed at reducing racial disparities in genetic research has unveiled the program’s first major trove of results.
“This is a huge deal,” says Dr. Joshua Denny, who runs the All of Us program at the National Institutes of Health.
In a series of papers published in February in the journals Nature, Nature Medicine, and Communications Biology, the program released the genetic sequences from 245,000 volunteers and some analysis of those data.
“What’s really exciting about this is that nearly half of those participants are of diverse race or ethnicity,” Denny says, adding that researchers found a wealth of genetic diversity.
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“We found more than a billion genetic points of variation in those genomes; 275 million variants that we found have never been seen before,” Denny says.
“Most of that variation won’t have an impact on health. But some of it will. And we will have the power to start uncovering those differences about health that will be relevant really maybe for the first time to all populations,” he says, including new genetic variations that play a role in the risk for diabetes.
