Determining who ultimately will benefit from the genomics revolution and new tailored approaches to disease treatment and prevention depends largely on who is studied, says Esteban Burchard, a physician scientist at the UCSF Asthma Collaboratory and a member of the Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group,15 which has advised the NIH on how to recruit study participants. In the past, racial and ethnic minorities have been largely excluded from genetic disease studies. As of 2011, 96% of the participants in the more than 1,000 genome-wide association studies conducted to that point were of European descent.12 Most physicians and scientists are therefore informed by research extrapolated from a largely white population, according to Burchard and colleagues.3
