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Precision Medicine Is Too White
Why the field lacks diversity, and how that can hurt everyone
Precision medicine has a bit of a “what can’t it do?” allure. Defined as “an approach for protecting health and treating disease that takes into account a person’s genes, behaviors, and environment,” it aims to help people get the right treatment, in the right dose, at the right time.
It’s something most of the public is open to: Only 1% of respondents to a survey commissioned by the Personalized Medicine Coalition and GenomeWeb reacted negatively to precision medicine. And it’s certainly the way of the future, with governmental support and technological advances moving the field forward and contributing to a $216.75 billion global market value by 2028, as predicted by a BIS Research report.
But all of this excitement and appeal distracts from a major flaw in today’s precision medicine efforts: Its lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the data, as well as in the teams doing the research.
“We need to have more inclusion of ethnically diverse people in humans genetics research so we can maximize the benefit from precision medicine,” says Sarah Tishkoff, PhD, a human geneticist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
