Tag Archives: diversity

When it comes to clinical trials, healthcare’s diversity problem is standing in the way of medical advancement

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Ellen McGirt and Jonathan Vanian, Fortune: November 5, 2021

The healthcare industry has long faced a major diversity problem affecting the clinical trials that pave the way for blockbuster medical treatments.

Historically, the type of candidates who have participated in clinical trials tended to be relatively white and homogenous, not truly representative of everyone who needs access to potentially life-saving treatments.

As Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research, once told Fortune, the lack of Black female participants in original cancer studies unfortunately resulted in fewer research into triple-negative breast cancer, which affects Black women more than white women. As a result, the researchers developing cancer treatments at that time, “didn’t realize that the treatments that they were studying would not work on those types of cancer,” she said.

Increasingly, however, the healthcare industry is trying to enlist more people of color who come from underrepresented communities into clinical trials, with the hope of improving the quality of future medical treatments that can aid everyone. Pharmaceutical giants Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer were two healthcare firms, for example, that have recently made public their efforts to improve the diversity of their clinical trials.

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One way Abbott is attempting to enlist more diverse clinical trial participants is by “purposely going into communities” that lacked access to clinical trials, Earnhardt says. This means opening up clinical trial sites outside of major metropolitan areas like New York City or San Francisco, which typically contain top-tier universities and healthcare centers. People of color who live outside of these urban centers face a number of hurdles trying to enlist in clinical studies conducted hundreds or even thousands of miles away from where they live.

Some of the new clinical testing sites Abbott has established are in places like Gilbert, Ariz., Jackson, Miss., Tallahassee, FL, and San Antonio, TX.

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Read the full article here.

What Genentech is doing to fix biotech’s diversity problem

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Fortune Editors, Fortune: April 7, 2021

There’s a big problem with clinical trials: a lack of diversity. And that issue is ultimately detrimental to countless people’s lives and health.

Take, for example, breast cancer research. For a long time, the thinking in the health care world was that Black women didn’t develop breast cancer as often as white women, but when they did, they were more likely to die because of it.

“There was this assumption that it was an issue of access to care, the quality of care,” says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit think tank that analyzes the latest research and helps consumers and organizations put that information to work. But “if you looked at the research, you saw that the original major studies of breast cancer treatment were done on white women.”

That meant the research featured fewer women with triple-negative breast cancer, which Black women develop more often than white women. “Because [women with triple-negative breast cancer] weren’t studied,” Zuckerman continues, “[the researchers] didn’t realize that the treatments that they were studying would not work on those types of cancer.”

Zuckerman talks with Fortune’s Ellen McGirt on this week’s episode of Leadership Next, a podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. Also on the episode with McGirt and cohost Alan Murray is Alexander Hardy, who became CEO of biotech company Genentech two years ago.

Hardy has made it clear that he’s committed to boosting diversity within the biotech world and in clinical trials, and he was already doing so before the pandemic. But COVID-19 crystallized some of the issues in the U.S.

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During the show, Hardy also discusses the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the biotech industry, and how those changes could spill over into research on diseases such as Alzheimer’s, ALS, and cancer.

To read the entire article and listen to the podcast, click here.