A Global Atlas of Immune Alleles Reveals Health-Relevant Variation Across Groups

GAIA genotyping of 20,248 individuals across HLA, IGHC, and FCGR reveals group-specific immune allele frequencies, including HLA-B vaccine coverage that needs up to 2.7× more alleles in underrepresented groups.

• Why it matters: Immune allele frequencies are needed for disease association mapping, pharmacogenomic guidance, and vaccine design, but most global groups lack such data.
• What they did: The Global Atlas of Immune Alleles applied benchmarked genotyping tools to whole-genome sequencing data, oversampling sub-Saharan African, Island Southeast Asian, and Pacific groups, and expanded the Allele Frequency Net Database by 38%.
• The result: GAIA identifies HLA alleles at group-specific frequencies that challenge pharmacogenomic screening recommendations and introduces MAD-X, showing 90% HLA-B coverage for vaccine design can require up to 2.7× more alleles in underrepresented groups than Northwest European ancestry.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.