People with different ancestries inherit different risks and encounter different environmental exposures resulting in different somatic profiles.
Research Presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, held April 8-13, 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana, demonstrates that a lack of knowledge about ancestry-specific alterations is a major barrier to implementing precision medicine, leading to inequities in genetic testing, targeted treatment, and clinical trial design for cancer patients from the underserved populations. However, a limited number of cancer cases from non-European populations have been sequenced in a research setting, and paired normal samples are often not collected in routine clinical care.
Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, and Foundation Medicine in Cambridge, MA looked at patients with African, South Asian, East Asian, American, and European ancestry from comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) of over 200,000 tumors and identified 18,717, 8,588, and 6,594 patients with significant proportions of African, American, East Asian ancestry, respectively.
Using logistic regressions with the age of diagnosis, gender, and tumor mutation burden (TMB) as covariates, they identified 165 ancestry-associated genes across 14 common cancer types.
Read More: https://www.oncozine.com/existing-data-may-help-identify-ancestry-associated-features-across-multiple-cancer-types/