Efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines by race and ethnicity

OBJECTIVES

Vaccine uptake amongst ethnic minority populations has been persistently lower, which may be because of socio-economic factors such as health literacy and health insurance status. This review aimed to assess to what extent COVID-19 clinical trials have considered the impact of race and ethnicity on COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy.

STUDY DESIGN

This was a systematic review.

METHODS

Data regarding ethnicity in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials were systematically reviewed according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines in this systematic review, which ran from inception until June 2021. Three international databases, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science, were used to conduct systematic article searches. Only two studies reported vaccine efficacy among ethnic minority groups.

RESULTS

The efficacy of the mRNA-1273 vaccine was confirmed to be 95% in Caucasians and 97.5% in 'people of colour' in a study by Baden et al. In another study by Polack et al., BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine efficacy was reported to be 95.2% in Caucasians, 100% in Afro-Caribbean or African Americans, 94.2% in Hispanic or Latinx and 95.4% in non-Hispanic, non-Latinx people.

CONCLUSIONS

Given the highly differing effect of COVID-19 on the Afro-Caribbean, Hispanic and South Asian populations, it is imperative for COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials to thoroughly assess the safety and efficacy of vaccines in different ethnicities and, if necessary, develop ethnicity-specific protocols, which can minimise the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on ethnic minority populations.

Constructing gene regulatory networks from microarray data using non-Gaussian pair-copula Bayesian networks

Many biological and biomedical research areas such as drug design require analyzing the Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) to provide clear insight and understanding of the cellular processes in live cells. Under normality assumption for the genes, GRNs can be constructed by assessing the nonzero elements of the inverse covariance matrix. Nevertheless, such techniques are unable to deal with non-normality, multi-modality and heavy tailedness that are commonly seen in current massive genetic data. To relax this limitative constraint, one can apply copula function which is a multivariate cumulative distribution function with uniform marginal distribution. However, since the dependency structures of different pairs of genes in a multivariate problem are very different, the regular multivariate copula will not allow for the construction of an appropriate model. The solution to this problem is using Pair-Copula Constructions (PCCs) which are decompositions of a multivariate density into a cascade of bivariate copula, and therefore, assign different bivariate copula function for each local term. In fact, in this paper, we have constructed inverse covariance matrix based on the use of PCCs when the normality assumption can be moderately or severely violated for capturing a wide range of distributional features and complex dependency structure. To learn the non-Gaussian model for the considered GRN with non-Gaussian genomic data, we apply modified version of copula-based PC algorithm in which normality assumption of marginal densities is dropped. This paper also considers the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm to determine the existence of a time delay relation between two genes. Breast cancer is one of the most common diseases in the world where GRN analysis of its subtypes is considerably important; Since by revealing the differences in the GRNs of these subtypes, new therapies and drugs can be found. The findings of our research are used to construct GRNs with high performance, for various subtypes of breast cancer rather than simply using previous models.