Dr. Williams-DeVane uses computational approaches to study medical data, with a particular focus on health disparities that impact African-Americans.

Dr. Williams-DeVane completed her B.S. at North Carolina Central University, and her Ph.D. at North Carolina State University. After 3 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, she was hired to run a bioinformatics core facility at NC Central University, and subsequently as an associate professor there. At Fisk, she is the Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics and Data Science.

After skin cancer, breast cancer is the second most-common type of cancer in women: it is estimated to impact 1 in 7 women. Although white women have historically had a higher prevalence of breast cancer than black women, black women have a higher mortality rate. The cause of this is unclear: there are likely genetic differences as well as differences in environmental exposures, access to treatment, and socioeconomic status that all play a role.

In a recent study, Dr. Williams-DeVane and colleagues looked for genetic differences, using a large study of breast cancer in North Carolina. 51% of study participants were black women and 49% were white women. The researchers collected RNA from tumor samples to look for genes that were “turned up” (upregulated) or “turned down” (downregulated) in one group of women compared to the other.

They identified a set of 8 genes that were different between tumors from black women and tumors from white women, many of which had been suggested by an earlier, much smaller study (#reproducibility). One of those genes, SQLE, was a clear example of a “disparity gene”: tumors with higher levels of SQLE were more aggressive and more likely to recur, and tumors from black women tended to have higher levels of that gene.

However, this kind of study cannot tell us why more SQLE is associated with worse outcomes or why it is turned up more in black women’s tumors. It could be triggered by exposure to an environmental carcinogen that black women are more likely to be exposed to, or it could be due to a genetic change that happened many generations ago that is being passed down within either racial group. Further research is necessary to answer these questions.