Dr. Clayton Yates, PhD, is a Johns Hopkins University professor of pathology and the director of Translational Health Disparities and Global Health Equity Research. He took time to sit down with WebMD and discuss the relatively new field of health disparities research and his pioneering studies into breast, pancreatic, and prostate cancers in African Americans.: Health disparities is a highly specialized field.
This is how you usually develop all the biology we have and the therapeutics we have currently in the world. If we don't have our models and we don't represent these populations, how can we develop?: One biomarker is that many African Americans appear to have distinctive changes in their gene structure that promote aggressive disease. We're still working on the formalization of utilizing that in the clinical setting.
If you take a homogeneous population such as native Africans, which should have over 98%, 99% African ancestry, what would be the contribution of those genes in African Americans? That's exactly what we did. We sequenced the first Nigerian prostate cancer genome, and we found all these unique mutations that were present in or more highly expressed in native Africans, compared to the European studies.
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