Aggregated News
An industry-academic initiative announced today aims to create the largest ever database of genomes exclusively from people with African ancestry. Four biopharma companies contributing $80 million have teamed up with Meharry Medical College to launch the effort, which hopes to recruit up to 500,000 African Americans and people from Africa and combine their DNA and medical data into a biobank for health studies.
“This is an historic partnership,” says James Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, of the initiative, called Together for Changing Healthcare for People of African Ancestry through an InterNational Genomics & Equity (Together for CHANGE). “Nothing like this has ever happened before, when multiple drug companies partner with an academic institution, especially an HBCU [historically Black college or university], to do something like this.”
People of African ancestry are among the most genetically diverse in the world, yet they make up less than 0.5% of participants in genetic studies and are still underrepresented in major genetic databases. In the UK Biobank, one of the largest in the world, about 1.6%...
