Big Pharmas partner with HBCU, with aim to create the largest African ancestry genomics database

An ini­tia­tive three years in the mak­ing that aims to cre­ate the largest African an­ces­try ge­nomics re­search data­base has fi­nal­ly launched with some of the biggest phar­ma names in the busi­ness be­hind it.

Mehar­ry Med­ical Col­lege, a his­tor­i­cal­ly Black med­ical school in Nashville, along with the Re­gen­eron Ge­net­ics Cen­ter, As­traZeneca, No­vo Nordisk, and Roche, de­vel­oped To­geth­er for CHANGE. The ini­tia­tive has a two-pronged ap­proach: build a ge­nomics data­base with up to 500,000 par­tic­i­pants, and cre­ate STEM pro­grams in di­verse com­mu­ni­ties for chil­dren and set up a grant pro­gram by the new Di­as­po­ra Hu­man Ge­nomics In­sti­tute (DH­GI) at Mehar­ry.

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