Molecular pathology selected abstracts
April 2024—Personalized medicine is revolutionizing cancer therapy, with targeted treatments customized to a person’s cancer-specific mutational profile leading to substantially improved health outcomes. Personalized medicine can also be applied to cancer prevention for high-risk groups based on genetic predisposition or lifestyle factors. However, there is a significant gap in cancer research resulting from a lack of equitable representation of racial and ethnic groups in cancer databases. Most research data are derived from white patients in the United States and Europe, creating racial disparities in understanding cancer development and therapies. The underrepresentation of patients of African, Asian, and Native American descent in observational, translational, and clinical cancer studies is particularly notable.