
Healthcare Insights
Feb 15, 2023
Insights for Life Sciences | November 9, 2022
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Clinical trial diversity is crucial as factors like age, ethnicity, race, and sex can significantly impact how people respond to medicines and vaccines. However, some communities have historically been underrepresented in clinical research due to barriers like a lack of access, awareness, and trust in drug development processes.
Pharma companies have accelerated to address diversity, ethnicity, and inclusion (DE&I) in their clinical trials. But are they doing enough to make a significant impact and accurately reflect the diverse patient population?
Ensuring racially and ethnically diverse participants is critical to the success of clinical trials. Deloitte research recently discovered it delivers three key advantages:
Despite these advantages, barriers like access, awareness, and a lack of trust still hold clinical trial diversity back. Deloitte’s research found areas of opportunity that pharma companies need to address:
In April 2022, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) expanded its guidance on boosting clinical trial diversity. It explained that, as the population becomes more diverse, it’s “fundamental to public health” for clinical trials to represent racial and ethnic minorities. It emphasized that biological differences can affect how people respond to therapies, potentially making treatments more or less toxic to different racial or ethnic groups. The FDA also advised that diversity was crucial for developing better treatments and fighting diseases that often significantly impact diverse communities.
Pharma companies, such as Pfizer and Merck, are increasingly committed to increasing diversity in their clinical trials.
Pfizer has committed to making clinical research more inclusive and developing more trusted relationships in diverse communities. It’s also designing clinical trials to ensure enrollment reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of countries they take place in and the epidemiology of diseases it treats and prevents. The company is also aiming to address clinical trial participation barriers by:
Merck has committed to advancing knowledge about treatment safety and efficacy for all people by ensuring diverse populations participate in clinical trials. It aims to enroll various people in trials worldwide, especially in the U.S., by improving everything from trial design to recruitment. It’s outlined a series of steps to ensure it achieves these goals:
Collaboration is critical in helping pharma companies enhance diversity in clinical trials. By building sustainable partnerships with people and groups across the ecosystem, from community members and academia to patient groups and federal and state agencies. In this manner, pharma can strengthen its profiles in underrepresented communities and establish a sustainable trial infrastructure.
For example, the Deloitte research discovered one vital collaboration tactic was enhanced data collection capabilities, which can improve the collection and sharing of real-world racial and ethnic data. It also advised developing resources that help patients identify and enroll in clinical trials.
As populations become more diverse, pharma must ensure their clinical trials accurately reflect the population. Increasing diversity can help organizations to develop new drugs and treatments that are safe and effective for everyone. Our recommendations to pharma companies wanting to accelerate DE&I in clinical trials are:
Learn more about Clarify Trials to enhance DE&I in your companies’ clinical trials.
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