To address health disparities and facilitate increasingly personalized treatments, we need to develop new models for basic and disease research that reflect diverse ancestral backgrounds and sex, and ensure that diverse populations are included among donors and research participants.
The power of science, a long-time cornerstone of disease mitigation, has been on public display during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the form of new strategies for vaccine development, epidemiological methods, therapeutic agents, and diagnostic tests. However, this pandemic also underscores the importance and urgency of tuning the power and reach of science to address disparities in infection and outcome. In addition to cultural, environmental and socioeconomic status, host genetic factors appear to have a role as at least 13 loci have been linked to infection or severe disease outcomes1. Genetic ancestral relationships also appear to be significant. For example, a COVID-19 risk locus for severe disease is present in 50% of people in South Asia but only in 16% of people in Europe2.
