Missing in Action: African Ancestry Brain Research

Abstract

Individuals of African ancestry have been starkly underrepresented in the pursuit of personalized medicine for brain illnesses. The African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative will seek to generate much-needed brain gene and protein expression profiles for people of African ancestry.

Figure 1

What’s Needed Is below the Water Line The African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative (AANRI) is a partnership between prominent community leaders in Baltimore, Maryland, the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Morgan State University, Brown Capital Management, The Abell Foundation, and the State of Maryland to generate a public functional genomic dataset focused on human brain from donors of AA. The first phase will go beyond earlier studies (i.e., the tip of the iceberg) to measure gene and protein expression of multiple brain regions and individual cells from 500 donors of AA. Future work will involve expanded brain datasets and pluripotent cell lines from brain donors. Abbreviations are explained in the text.