Racial and ethnic disparities in a real-world precision oncology data registry

Alexander T M Cheung; Elina L Palapattu; Isabella R Pompa; Christopher M Aldrighetti; Andrzej Niemierko; Henning Willers; Franklin Huang; Neha Vapiwala; Eliezer Van Allen; Sophia C Kamran

doi:10.1038/s41698-023-00351-6

Racial and ethnic disparities in a real-world precision oncology data registry

NPJ Precis Oncol. 2023 Jan 19;7(1):7. doi: 10.1038/s41698-023-00351-6.

Authors

Alexander T M Cheung^#^{1

2}, Elina L Palapattu^#^{2

3}, Isabella R Pompa⁴, Christopher M Aldrighetti⁴, Andrzej Niemierko⁴, Henning Willers⁴, Franklin Huang⁵, Neha Vapiwala⁶, Eliezer Van Allen^{2

3}, Sophia C Kamran^{7

8}

Affiliations

¹ NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA.
² Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.
³ Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA.
⁴ Department of Radiation Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
⁵ Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
⁶ Department of Radiation Oncology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
⁷ Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA. skamran@mgh.harvard.edu.
⁸ Department of Radiation Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. skamran@mgh.harvard.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Biorepositories enable precision oncology research by sharing clinically annotated genomic data, but it remains unknown whether these data registries reflect the true distribution of cancers in racial and ethnic minorities. Our analysis of Project Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange (GENIE), a real-world cancer data registry designed to accelerate precision oncology discovery, indicates that minorities do not have sufficient representation, which may impact the validity of studies directly comparing mutational profiles between racial/ethnic groups and limit generalizability of biomarker discoveries to all populations.