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Gambian women exemplify Africa’s wide genetic diversityPxHere / Wikimedia CommonsMeharry Medical College, the first medical school for African Americans in the southern USA, has partnered with four pharmaceutical companies (Regeneron, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Roche) to sequence the genomes of up to 500,000 African Americans and Africans and then to store the results in a database for health research. Each of the four companies will contribute US$20 million. The plan is to recruit academic partners on the African continent who will be given exclusive access to the data. An ethics committee composed of leaders of the Black community and a religious leader will ensure that all research activities are ethically and culturally appropriate. Despite representing less than 0.5% of participants in genetic studies, populations of African descent are among the most genetically diverse in the world. Just 1.6% of the half million participants in the UK Biobank, one of the largest biomedical databases in the world, identify as Black or Black British. The discrepancy is concerning because treatment strategies for Europeans not of African ancestry might not be as effective in people with African ancestry (Science, October 18).
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