What Holds Back Diversity in Clinical Trials?

Despite an industry-wide push for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, clinical trials still suffer from a lack of diversity. Patient populations are much more diverse than those represented in most trials, limiting applicability to these groups, who may have different responses to the same therapeutic option. In the first of a two-part PharmaPhorum series, Tanya Chambers and Liam Johnstone explain how unrepresentative patient populations weaken clinical research.

According to the authors, “To mitigate against potentially lower drug efficacy or a different drug safety profile in a wider population vs those findings evidenced in RCTs it is important for companies to include ‘patient-orientated’ outcomes (relief of symptoms) alongside traditional endpoints (blood pressure, glucose concentrations). The diversity of clinical trial patients in the context of disease prevalence is key to capturing ‘patient-orientated’ outcomes in populations. For example, with skin conditions, textbooks, studies, and trial photos often present lighter-skinned individuals’ symptoms, which are bound to differ in darker skinned individuals.”

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(Source: PharmaPhorum, May 27^th, 2022)