A research team based at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta has been selected as one of five teams globally to receive a multimillion-dollar award, which it will put toward studies to address cancer disparities among populations of African descent.
The research team — called SAMBAI, which stands for Societal, Ancestry, Molecular and Biological Analyses of Inequalities — received the five-year $25 million grant through Cancer Grand Challenge, which is funded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute.
The SAMBAI team includes researchers in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa and the U.K., and will be led by Melissa Davis, PhD, director of the Institute of Translational Genomic Medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine.
According to a March 7 news release, the group aims to better understand how a range of factors such as social determinants of health, genetic contributions and environmental exposures interact in cancer outcomes. They plan to home in on breast cancer disparities among Black women, who face a higher death risk than white women despite incidence rates being slightly lower among Black women.