Precision medicine, which leverages a patient’s genetics to help make medical decisions, has the potential to revolutionize medicine. Its applications are numerous: from predicting who may have an adverse reaction to a medication, to allowing targeted therapies of cancer with particular mutations. In 2015, President Obama’s State of the Union announced an initiative to further our understanding of precision medicine and to build the infrastructure to implement it. An important part of this initiative is building a large diverse research cohort to help discover disease-gene and drug-gene associations. The key word is diverse – because genetic risk factors can be population-specific. In the past, individuals of African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern ancestry have been understudied. Only by including individuals from all different ancestral backgrounds can we hope to implement precision medicine in an inclusive way.

In 2011, Russ Altman’s research group was pondering the importance of inclusive precision medicine when it became clear that several studies examining the baseline genetic variation across the globe, 1000 Genomes and the International HapMap Project, had an underrepresentation of Middle Eastern populations. As a scientist of Iranian descent who had undergone direct-to-consumer genotyping with 23andMe, I wondered how to make sense of my data when no baseline genetic study of the Iranian population existed. When scientists Dr. Mostafa Ronaghi and Dr. Pardis Sabeti approached Dr. Altman’s group about the idea of creating such a baseline, I was immediately interested. Through the generous support of the PARSA Foundation, we began our journey to create a genetic baseline of the Iranian population.