Genomic profiling of patients who were treated for colorectal cancer at a major U.S.
cancer center showed that patients with African ancestry had fewer actionable mutations than patients with European ancestry and were less likely to qualify for treatment with immunotherapy, according to data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2023, held April 14-19 in Orlando, Florida. “African American patients are known to have worse clinical outcomes from colorectal cancer than patients from other racial backgrounds. The reasons for this are complex and likely reflect differences in risk factors, access to health care, and other socioeconomic variables,” explained the study’s first author, Henry Walch, MS, a computational biologist at the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). “However, the extent to which differences in germline or somatic genomic alterations influence outcomes remains unknown.”