Biljana Naumovic: Building equitable access should be an all-encompassing priority – not an afterthought or a last step.

Biljana Naumovic, Worldwide Vice President Oncology at The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson made the following post on LinkedIn:

“For far too long, we’ve been chasing after equality instead of equity in Clinical Trials. This has left us with a disenchanted reality: a majority of clinical trials do not reflect diverse patient populations that may benefit from cancer therapies being studied.

On the heels of Blood Cancer and Prostate Cancer Awareness Months, consider the fact that Black people are twice as likely to develop multiple myeloma than white people, and yet they only account for 6% of participants in clinical studies. When it comes to prostate cancer, enrollment rates of Black and Hispanic patients have fallen 67% and 44% below what is expected based on the prostate cancer incidence in these communities, according to one study.

It’s clear that we must change course at an urgent pace – but we can’t begin to do so without acknowledging the systemic cause of the issue: inequitable access. Time and again, clinical development plans are approved and executed without considering real-world barriers to participation, such as a lack of insurance, transportation, or diverse representation among clinical trial teams. This is a glaring and negligent mistake that we can’t afford to make. We must proactively account for these barriers and incorporate diverse recruitment strategies into the earliest stages of clinical trial design.

That’s why at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, we passionately pursue strategic collaborations that aim to put these building blocks in place to ensure equity, not just equality, in clinical trials. Most recently, we collaborated with the American Association for Cancer Research, the FDA and fellow industry peers to outline tangible steps clinical trial sponsors can take to improve diversity in clinical trials, as published in the journal of Clinical Cancer Research. We’ve also collaborated with Stand Up To Cancer to sponsor research teams that aim to develop sustainable, scalable and replicable approaches to remove barriers to Phase 1 and 2 clinical trial participation for patients of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and with the American Cancer Society to support the advancement of sustainable models of oncology patient navigation, and increase awareness and participation in clinical trials in under-represented communities.

Building equitable access should be an all-encompassing priority – not an afterthought or a last step. It should guide every single decision, from the selection of site locations, to the frequency of visits required of participants, to the materials used to train study teams.

Because it’s only through equity that we can advance innovation and deliver lifesaving treatments to the patients who need them.”

Source: Biljana Naumovic/LinkedIn