BGU Research is Key to Sephardic Genetic Testing
BGU Research is Key to Sephardic Genetic Testing
June 16, 2015
Jewish Business News — There has been a call to action in the Sephardic Jewish community to embrace genetic testing like the Ashkenazi Jewish community does.
Ashkenazi Jews have been widely tested for Tay-Sachs and other genetic diseases since the mid-1980s, but lack of research about Sephardic genetic disorders and minimal outreach to Sephardic Jews have meant that the same levels of testing and disease eradication do not exist in this community.
Prof. Ohad Birk
Prof. Ohad Birk, head of the Morris Kahn Lab of Human Genetics at the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev at BGU and of the Genetics Institute at Soroka University Medical Center, says that one of the reasons for the lack of research is that the Sephardic community is more complex and disparate than the Ashkenazi community.
The same genetic mutations exist in Ashkenazi Jews from throughout Eastern Europe —Poland, Germany, Hungary, and so on. In contrast, there are distinct genetic mutations for each of the Sephardic communities, such as those from North Africa, India, Morocco, and Ethiopia.
In the last eight years, Prof. Birk and his team have been researching genetic diseases specific to Sephardic communities. They discovered the disease Progressive Cerebro-Cerebella Atrophy (PCCA), which affects dozens of Israeli families of Iraqi and Moroccan-Jewish descent.
Prof. Birk’s team also discovered PCCA2, a different genetic mutation that leads to a similar disease in Moroccan Jews. There is a 1-in-40 chance for Jews of Moroccan descent to be a carrier for PCCA or PCCA2.
Further, Dr. Birk and his team uncovered a genetic mutation on the gene SLC38A8, which is specific to the Jewish community of Mumbai, India, and leads to a severe eye disease affecting short-range and long-range vision.
“These diseases are very severe, but equally as preventable. The research continues all the time, and so should the testing,” says Prof. Birk.
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