Here’s how we can make clinical trials more inclusive

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Since COVID-19 made its way to the United States, we have seen a stream of worrying news of the pandemic’s impact on cancer care in the U.S., including 9.4 million missed screenings1 for just about all forms of cancer. While screening rates rebounded in the fall of 20202, there’s a growing concern from oncologists that screenings haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels for everyone. 

And the data are compelling. From September to December 2020, for example, fewer Black and Hispanic women2 had mammograms than in the three months prior to the pandemic. In addition, Black men were 25% less likely3 than their white counterparts to get a prostatectomy during the pandemic. 

There is significant concern among health equity advocates that the pandemic’s ripple effects on cancer care could be sustaining or even deepening widely recognized and reported health disparities for vulnerable communities, including Black, Latinx, and rural Americans.4 Warnings from experts of the pandemic’s impact on cancer disparities necessitate an even greater urgency to further reduce gaps in care.

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Jenny Sherak
Senior vice president & President, Specialty Physician Services AmerisourceBergen
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Joseph FraiettaPietro GenoveseSwim Across America, the nonprofit funding innovative clinical trials and patient-centered programs for cancer, awarded $450,000 grants to two of its beneficiaries, Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to support the work of novel gene and base editing techniques used in advanced cancer research, including targeted therapies, immunotherapies, and cellular therapies. 
Most cancer genome studies have focused on mutations in the tumor itself and how such gene variants allow a tumor to grow unchecked. A study led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis takes a deep dive into inherited cancer mutations measured in a healthy blood sample and reports how those mutations might take a toll on the body’s cells starting at birth, perhaps predisposing a person to develop cancers at various stages of life.
Jenny Sherak
Senior vice president & President, Specialty Physician Services AmerisourceBergen

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