Developing Educational Approaches to Genomics for Mexican-Americans in East Los Angeles (HAPMAP Supplement)

The goal of this project is to collect cell samples from 40 trios of Mexican-American background for NHGRIs HapMap project, with cells being deposited at the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. This will be done after extensive community consultation and engagement. This effort builds on our recent experience in developing community consultation and sample collection in the same population for the NIGMS Human Genetic Cell Repository at the Coriell Institute. The proposed new HapMap community consultation and engagement will consist of a multi-faceted effort to address the Mexican-American community from multiple perspectives. The constitutive elements of that effort are: 1) Informal networking in the community, 2) Small meetings with CAG and community leaders (60 community leaders involved), 3) Large meetings with Community leaders; one midway through the project, the other near the end of the project, 4) 8 meetings of a Working Group, 5) 8 Focus Group Meetings, including meetings with specific disease groups (such as middle-age men with AIDS), 6) Two Community Research Forums, 7) Sample collection. We will also focus on making an effort to give something back to the community. In that regard, we propose to develop a local site for the American Psychiatric Association National Depression Screening Day. UCLA is an ideal setting for this work. Our strengths include a highly cohesive, bilingual (Spanish-English), cross-disciplinary research group with expertise in genetics, pharmacogenetics, sociology, anthropology, medicine, psychiatry, pharmacology, social work, and nursing. Our efforts are supported by institutional strengths such as the UCLA Cesar Chavez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies, the UCLA General Clinical Research Center, which has considerable experience with patient-oriented investigation in Mexican-Americans, the UCLA Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Research Group (a large, prospective, NIGMS-funded study that is focused entirely on Mexican-Americans), and the UCLA Community Consultation Program Office. Additionally, we have successfully completed a similar community consultation and sample collection from Mexican-Americans for NIGMS.