Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are emerging in newly industrialized countries in Asia, South America, and the Middle East and, therefore, IBD has evolved into a global disease. With such an increasing prevalence in every continent, the costs of health care are predicted to also increase exponentially.1 However, most of the research on IBD, primarily targeting the main subtypes of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis (UC), has focused on populations with a European ancestry. In a Nature comment in 2011, Bustamante et al2 state that approximately 96% of the large genetic studies included patients of European descent.