Sumit Jamuar: Indians are 20 of the world's population, but represent only 1 of existing genetic data

As the new frontier in medicine, genomics brings with it the hope of allowing researchers to find the cure for a number of largely incurable diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer’s, to infectious diseases and beyond. The challenge now is to map the DNA of as many ethnicities and nationalities as possible. Currently, 81 per cent of the existing genetic data is from Caucasians. One company is trying to bridge the gap by analysing the genome of different ethnicities in India, with hopes of expanding to the rest of Asia, Latin America and Africa. “You look at India, with 1.3 billion people, 20 per cent of the world’s population. A lot of people of Indian ethnicities reside globally, and yet they comprise less than 1 per cent of genomic insights and understanding”, says Sumit Jamuar, chairman and CEO of Global Gene Corp. He spoke with LSE Business Review’s managing editor, Helena Vieira, on 9 November 2017, during Web Summit in Lisbon.