The National Institutes of Health recently announced a remarkable achievement: the world’s largest database of human genomes, a repository of information that the agency says will help usher in a new era in personalized medicine.
Scientists are already developing clinical tools and techniques based on genomic information gathered from the agency’s All of Us program. One of the most promising? Polygenic risk scores. These can help predict a person’s likelihood of developing complex diseases, like cardiovascular disease and breast cancer, from as early as infancy.
But there’s a glaring problem: The tools were trained overwhelmingly on the DNA of people of European descent … . For some conditions, the forecasts for people of color are almost no better than flipping a coin.
… [P]resent-day Europeans descend from a small group of Africans who expanded out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. As a result, they have much less diversity.
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“If you’re going to pick a population to study for the sake of everybody’s good, the Europeans are the worst you could choose,” said Jay Kaufman, an epidemiologist at McGill University who has written about race and genomics.
