# Development of Polygenic Scores for Medication Response in Diverse Populations

> **NIH NIH R21** · HENRY FORD HEALTH + MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2024 · $246,776

## Abstract

Polygenic scores (PS) represent an exciting translational application of genomic information that
can mitigate some short comings of traditional genetic approaches, and which have great
potential towards understanding and leveraging genetic predisposition to health traits. However,
key barriers to clinical application exist, prominently including the fact that current PS were
developed nearly exclusively using European individuals. These PS are much less predictive
when applied to non-European populations (e.g. African Americans). Second is that there has
been only very limited application of PS to pharmacogenomics, despite that medication use is
arguably the most common and impactful type of medical intervention for patients with common
chronic diseases. The goal of this proposed project is to develop novel methods to create and
validate PS for African Americans that predict medication response in common complex
conditions. To accomplish the goal of valid and ancestry robust PS for African Americans, we
will develop innovative analytic approaches that incorporate localized ancestry to construct PS
in a manner that allows for SNP selection and the allelic effect to be dependent on the local
ancestry context, thus creating tools that are robust to varying genetic admixture and population
structure. We will then compare the performance of these novel tools to two current methods
(including state-of-the-art Bayesian approaches) within cohorts of African American patients
across two different common complex diseases (heart failure and diabetes).

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10904500
- **Project number:** 1R21HL168695-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** HENRY FORD HEALTH + MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** David E Lanfear
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $246,776
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-08-15 → 2026-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10904500

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10904500, Development of Polygenic Scores for Medication Response in Diverse Populations (1R21HL168695-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10904500. Licensed CC0.

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