Cancer geneticists ponder ethnic bias in scientific research at the latest AACR meeting

In most cases, medical studies, genetic databases and other health-related research is predominately conducted on people of European descent and according to cancer geneticists, reports Nature, this has limited the knowledge scientists have about other populations, further increasing the global disparity in cancer incidence and outcomes. African Americans in the U.S., for example, are more likely to die from certain cancers than are white people.  

However, that could be changing according to the buzz that took place at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Atlanta, GA. Nature reports that researchers there expressed renewed hope in response to what they feel is a growing interest among fellow scientists, government support and funding entities eager to close the gap and make medical research more inclusive.  

“It’s a historical year for us working in cancer health disparities,” said Laura Fejerman, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies breast cancer in Latina women at the meeting. “We’ve been trying to show researchers who don’t work on health disparities that this is a really important issue.” 

Much the same way severe maternal morbidity is highest among non-Hispanic black women and lowest among non-Hispanic white women, differences in cancer risk and survival are likely to be the result of social, economic and genetic factors. Patients selected for clinical trials are often unintentionally biased against minority ethnic groups — for example, by excluding people with certain disorders that are more common in such populations, reports Nature. Moreover, due to a legacy of unethical and racist practices, ethnic populations are often mistrustful of medical research which could also play a role in why their numbers are so low in clinical trials. 

“Then there is the simple matter of numbers: the rarer a cancer, the harder it is to enroll enough study participants from a minority population to gather statistically meaningful data,” writes Heidi Leford.  The good news: more studies are underway to reverse the trend, an effort launched by the AACR last year to sequence the genomes of tumors from 2,020 African Americans by 2020. 

Another $26.5-million project funded by the National Institutes of Health and Prostate Cancer Foundation is working to recruit 10,000 African American men recently diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Researchers are also re-examining how genomic data is collected and labeled. For example, the word ‘Asian’ has been used to describe people from numerous countries who have very different genetics and live very different lifestyles. The same goes for the term ‘African American’ as Africa contains many different regions and populations – hence different genetic makeups.   

That is a mistake, oncologist Olufunmilayo Olopade of the University of Chicago in Illinois told the AACR meeting. “Africa is a huge continent and you can’t just reduce it to one monolithic population,” said Olopade, who presented her work on African Americans in Chicago and Africans in Nigeria. 

Fejerman's genetic studies of breast cancer includes Latinas outside the U.S. and she has gathered a consortium of researchers to study populations in California and Peru. “It’s great for us and for the Latinas in the U.S. because we are learning about a genome that they share,” she said. “But we are also giving something to the populations in Latin America that don’t have the resources.” 

So, with hope and enthusiasm comes more skepticism about whether the cancer data gap will narrow soon enough to coincide with cutting edge medicine, Leford reports. “The problem is that [Latinas] are so behind, so low in terms of numbers compared to women of European ancestry, that it’s going to take a long time and a lot of money to make it equal,” Fejerman said, noting that under-represented populations would remain at a disadvantage as scientists work in the field of precision medicine where treatment is developed based on an individual’s genome and physiology. 

Leford pointed to Candace Henley, a patient advocate in Chicago, who said preliminary genetic studies of minority groups aren’t adequate if discrimination and lack of access of healthcare isn’t addressed first. “We still have a long way to go,” she said.