On Oct. 18, 2023, an industry-academic initiative was announced that aimed to create the largest ever database of genomes exclusively from people with African ancestry. Four biopharma companies contributed $80 million and have teamed up with Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee to launch the effort, which hopes to recruit up to 500,000 African Americans and people from Africa and combine their DNA and medical data into a biobank for health studies.

“This is an historic partnership,” says James Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, of the initiative, called Together for Changing Healthcare for People of African Ancestry through an InterNational Genomics & Equity (Together for CHANGE). “Nothing like this has ever happened before, when multiple drug companies partner with an academic institution, especially an HBCU [historically Black college or university], to do something like this.”

People of African ancestry are among the most genetically diverse in the world, yet they make up less than 0.5% of participants in genetic studies and are still underrepresented in major genetic databases. In the UK Biobank, one of the largest in the world, about 1.6% of the half-million participants identify as Black or Black British. And although the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) All of Us study aims to build a diverse biobank, only about 17% of the roughly 500,000 fully enrolled participants recruited so far identify as Black, African American, or African.

The project will be led by the recently formed Diaspora Human Genomics Institute (DHGI), a new institute at Meharry. It will recruit participants receiving medical care there and at other health systems run by HBCUs, drawing on participants’ deidentified medical records for clinical data. To capture the broad cultural and genetic diversity of Africa, Mitnaul says the project is also looking to recruit academic partners from across the African continent. They have already identified some partners, such as the University of Zambia.

An important feature of the new initiative is that all the partner organizations—the HBCUs as well as those in Africa—will have exclusive access to the sequencing data. And the DHGI and investigators will be free to create new collaborations with other institutions that are interested in accessing the data. Williams is glad to see such access and freedom in the new project, he says, because pharmaceutical companies have historically been restrictive with data sharing.