Beverly Grove-based Cedars-Sinai Health System announced Oct. 9 that it has been awarded a five-year, $8.3 million grant by the National Cancer Institute to study the risk of Covid-19 for minority populations.

The Cedars-Sinai research team will collect and analyze data from the population of patients that the health system serves in Los Angeles County.

“There is a critical need for more knowledge regarding the determinants of Covid-19-related risks in minority subgroups,” Susan Cheng, director of public health research at Cedars’ Smidt Heart Institute, said in the announcement.

“We are finding widening ethnic and racial disparities in both the risk of infection and the severity of this disease,” she added.

Cheng is one of three co-principal investigators for the grant. The other two are Jane Figueiredo, director of community and population health research at the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center and Michael Karin, professor of pharmacology and pathology at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Also as part of the grant award, Cedars-Sinai has been designated by the National Institutes of Health as one of eight “centers for excellence” for a collaborative of more than 25 universities, cancer centers and laboratories.

The collaborative’s mission is to gain more knowledge of immunology and Covid-19 in the U.S. The National Cancer Institute, which awarded the grant to Cedars, is part of the NIH.