OnCo
ideasIdea

Build polygenic scores that work in every ancestry before deploying any

Genetic risk scores were built mostly on Europeans and work worse in others. Funding non-European cohorts and setting a portability standard would prevent screening that widens inequality.

Polygenic score accuracy drops substantially in African and South Asian ancestry. Propose a funding programme for diverse cohorts and a programme standard requiring PRS discrimination within 20% across ancestries before use in screening.

Hypothesis
Multi-ancestry training and standards reduce the performance gap for breast, prostate and colorectal PRS to under 20% within five years.
Rationale
The portability gap is a training-data problem; deployment without standards locks in inequity.
What would test it
Benchmark PRS annually against a held-out multi-ancestry cohort.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
research
Cost to try
Large (over $50M)
Years to first evidence
5
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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