Asian American Community Responses to Blood Biospecimen Drives: Findings and Implications

Background: The reluctance to contribute blood from racially diverse groups such as Asian Americans impedes the likelihood of developing personalized approaches for cancer treatment and insights that can result from understanding the molecular, biochemical, and genomic characterizations of biospecimens.

Methods: We hypothesized that through building community trust and partnerships we would be able to collect healthy blood samples from community members to serve as “healthy” referent tissue against known cases. After building trust, we hosted blood drives in the Hmong, Chinese and Vietnamese communities. Results: We collected 662 biospecimens from 184 community participants. Blood samples were tested for HBsAg and for hemoglobin A1c, both independent risk factors for liver cancer. Fifteen of the 184 subjects tested positive for the Hepatitis B. Seven of 97 subjects were considered diabetic and 25 showed high levels of glucose indicating an increased risk for diabetes.

Conclusions: The positive response from our novel community approach demonstrated (1) the willingness of Asian Americans in non-clinical settings to contribute blood for cancer research when approached properly; (2) previously undetected disease risks that documents “invisible” health risks from English-limited Asians; and (3) the value of earning the community's trust. While admittedly convenience samples, our community experience led us to pursue comparative studies of known HBsAg positive Asian patients as part of a larger study to study the progression of HBV infection to hepatocellular cancer (HCC) through examining RNA sequencing to ascertain expression levels and cataloguing the SNP variants between HCC cases and controls.