According to a new report, non-whites may benefit less from any medical break-throughs emerging from stem cell research, as currently all human embryonic stem cell lines used for research has come mostly from white donors.

Researchers reporting online in the New England Journal of Medicine said, blacks will be particularly affected, as none of the widely used stem cell lines studied have indicated any traces of recent African ancestry, stressing the importance of including stem cells from other populations for increasing the diversity of embryonic stem cell lines.

Noah Rosenberg, co-author of the study said, after examining 10 of the 20-embryonic stem cell lines, the U. S. National Institutes of Health recently approved for federally funded research. Researchers found the population ancestry of a large collection of human embryonic stem cell lines commonly used in research seemed to have been derived from European or Middle Eastern populations, with only two lines linked to East Asians and none to populations with recent African ancestry.

However, the importance of stem cell lineage remains uncertain, and it is not known to which extent the ancestry of embryonic stem cell lines may impact the utility of therapies and drugs developed by using stem cell research.