PRS Center for Admixed Populations (CAPE)

Population admixture has brought together genomes from continental populations that have diverged primarily because of genetic drift, but also because of different selective pressures.  Although disentangling interplay of genetic and environment (e.g., as proxied by genetic ancestries) in admixed populations is critical for precision medicine, admixed genomes represent only ~4% of participants in current databases with statistical toolkit for admixture in its infancy. The PRS Center for Admixed Populations (CAPE) aims to develop and deploy methods for admixture-PRS that provide high accuracies for genomic prediction within admixed genomes, by leveraging one of the largest dataset of admixed individuals of >230,000 individuals across EHR- and cohort-based studies to build, test and calibrate admixture-PRS. This project is led by Bogdan Pasaniuc (UPenn, contact PI), Eimear Kenny (Mt. Sinai, MPI), and Leslie Lange (U of Colorado, MPI). CAPE is part of the NIH-funded PRIMED Consortium to develop and evaluate methods to improve the use of polygenic risk scores to predict disease and health outcomes towards accurate translation.

NIH RePORTER: U01HG011715

Contact PI

• Bogdan Pasaniuc (UPenn)

MPI

• Eimear Kenny (Mount Sinai)
• Leslie Lange (University of Colorado)

Program Officer

• Mollie Minear (NIH,  National Institutes of Health)

Selected Outcomes:

• Admix-kit: an integrated toolkit and pipeline for genetic analyses of admixed populations, Hou et al Bionformatics 2024
• Principles and methods for translating polygenic scoring in medicine, Kachuri et al Nat Rev Genet 2024
• Causal effects on complex traits are similar across different ancestries, Hou et al Nat Genet 2023
• Polygenic scoring varies across genetic ancestry continuum, Ding et al Nature 2023
• Impact of cross-ancestry genetic architecture on gene mapping in admixed populations, Mester et al AJHG 2023; Hou et al Nat Genet 2021