Race Based Medicine

Race-Based medicine raises ethical, legal, social and policy implications that must be addressed. Among some of the concerns of race-based medicine is that it may: reify race; spur a belief amongst racial minorities that they are genetically inferior - reaffirming inherent inequities that already exist; and contribute to a loss of funding geared toward the prevention of disease. And while there are almost 700 race-based medicines in development geared at African-Americans the drug development companies seem to be operating under the notion that races are genetically different, with no solid proof to date to verify this. This ignores the complexity of population genomics and results in people using genetics as a proxy for race.

Is the pharmaceutical industry trying to create new ethnic markets to sell drugs to and generate profit from or are they sincerely interested in eliminating racial health disparities? And, by creating race-based medicines are they actually limiting the amount of profit they can incur from a drug if it is targeted at only one racial group? What policy initiatives are and are not in place to regulate this market? Whose voices are missing from the policy discussions? Why does it matter? Using race-based medicine as its focus, this session will explore how an over-reliance on biomedicine, and genetic, causation as a framework for the study and treatment of disease potentially eclipses the efforts of those working at the intersection of social justice and community health.