{"entity":{"id":"idea-prev-prs-ancestry-portability-standard","kind":"idea","name":"Build polygenic scores that work in every ancestry before deploying any","aka":[],"tldr":"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.","summary":"Polygenic risk scores were built mostly on Europeans and work worse in others, so this idea funds diverse cohorts and sets a portability standard requiring comparable PRS discrimination across ancestries before any score is used in screening. Accuracy drops substantially in African and South Asian ancestry, the gap is a training-data problem, and deployment without standards locks in inequity. The aim is to close the performance gap for breast, prostate and colorectal PRS within five years. The test benchmarks scores annually against a held-out multi-ancestry cohort. At early-clinical maturity it addresses the bottlenecks Inherited risk is mostly unidentified and Trials do not represent the people who get cancer.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Inherited risk is mostly unidentified): Childers et al., National estimates of genetic testing in women with breast or ovarian cancer (JCO 2017)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2017.73.6314"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":["prevention"],"technologies":["germline-testing"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-hereditary-risk","b-trial-diversity"],"keyPapers":["paper-childers-j-clin-oncol"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"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.","test":"Benchmark PRS annually against a held-out multi-ancestry cohort.","maturity":"early-clinical","actor":"research","cost":"large","horizonYears":5},"route":"/ideas/idea-prev-prs-ancestry-portability-standard/","neighbours":{"section":[{"id":"prevention","kind":"section","name":"Prevention & Risk","route":"/fronts/prevention/"}],"technology":[{"id":"germline-testing","kind":"technology","name":"Germline (hereditary) testing","route":"/technologies/germline-testing/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-hereditary-risk","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Inherited risk is mostly unidentified","route":"/bottlenecks/b-hereditary-risk/"},{"id":"b-trial-diversity","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Trials do not represent the people who get cancer","route":"/bottlenecks/b-trial-diversity/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-childers-j-clin-oncol","kind":"paper","name":"National Estimates of Genetic Testing in Women With a History of Breast or Ovarian Cancer","route":"/key-papers/paper-childers-j-clin-oncol/"}],"roadmap":[{"id":"prevention-roadmap","kind":"roadmap","name":"Cancer prevention roadmap: tobacco control and vaccines → biomarker-guided chemoprevention → interception in carriers","route":"/roadmaps/prevention-roadmap/"}]}}