Abstract
Over the past decades, consistent studies have shown that race/ethnicity have a great impact on cancer incidence, survival, drug response, molecular pathways and epigenetics. Despite the influence of race/ethnicity in cancer outcomes and its impact in health care quality, a comprehensive understanding of racial/ethnic inclusion in oncological research has never been addressed. We therefore explored the racial/ethnic composition of samples/individuals included in fundamental (patient-derived oncological models, biobanks and genomics) and applied cancer research studies (clinical trials). Regarding patient-derived oncological models (n = 794), 48.3% have no records on their donor’s race/ethnicity, the rest were isolated from White (37.5%), Asian (10%), African American (3.8%) and Hispanic (0.4%) donors. Biobanks (n = 8,293) hold specimens from unknown (24.56%), White (59.03%), African American (11.05%), Asian (4.12%) and other individuals (1.24%). Genomic projects (n = 6,765,447) include samples from unknown (0.6%), White (91.1%), Asian (5.6%), African American (1.7%), Hispanic (0.5%) and other populations (0.5%). Concerning clinical trials (n = 89,212), no racial/ethnic registries were found in 66.95% of participants, and records were mainly obtained from Whites (25.94%), Asians (4.97%), African Americans (1.08%), Hispanics (0.16%) and other minorities (0.9%). Thus, two tendencies were observed across oncological studies: lack of racial/ethnic information and overrepresentation of Caucasian/White samples/individuals. These results clearly indicate a need to diversify oncological studies to other populations along with novel strategies to enhanced race/ethnicity data recording and reporting.
Highlights
NCI Patient-Derived Models Repository (PDMR) includes patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) and in vitro patient-derived cell cultures (PDCs)[6]
To have a complete understanding of racial/ethnic inclusion in cancer research, we have studied these demographic characteristics in several aspects of oncological research, from cell lines and patient-derived xenografts to biobanking, genomics and clinical trials
We found no racial/ethnic data for the majority of samples (62.86%). Of those with race/ethnicity reported, 36.19% were obtained from Whites and 0.95% were obtained from African Americans
Summary
NCI Patient-Derived Models Repository (PDMR) includes patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) and in vitro patient-derived cell cultures (PDCs)[6]. Yamoah et al.[17] found differential expression of six prostate cancer-associated biomarkers (AMACR, ERG, SPINK1, NKX3-1, GOLM1 and AR) between African American and European American patients These markers predicted the risk of clinic-pathologic outcomes in an ethnicity-dependent manner[17]. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Therapeutically Applicable Research To Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) efforts aim to identify molecular alterations, at the protein, RNA, DNA and epigenetic levels, to establish tumor classifications with improved accuracy[3]. These genomic signatures allow clinicians to administer personalized cancer treatments[13,18,19,20,21]. Korean, and Japanese female non-smokers with AD presented a higher prevalence of mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene compared to Whites
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