Evaluating and improving health equity and fairness of polygenic scores

Description

Dr. Tianyu Zhang from Carnegie Mellon University will discuss a new polygenic score framework and how it may benefit underrepresented populations.

 
Overview of Presentation

• Genetic scores of individuals can be used to predict their traits, such as eventual disease status.

• These polygenic scores work best in the ancestry from which they were developed. Lack of portability across ancestries violates fairness principles and could generate clinical harm.

• We propose a computationally efficient method—Joint Lassosum—to improve the portability.

• A systematic simulation study is presented to answer when and how much the proposed framework would improve the score prediction accuracy for underrepresented ancestry groups.