Despite decades of ongoing efforts to improve racial and ethnic diversity in clinical trials, many gaps remain in achieving demographic representation in clinical studies. In May 2024, the National Academies Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation, in collaboration with the National Cancer Policy Forum, hosted a public workshop to explore system-level changes and initiatives across organizations and sectors to improve representation, data collection, and reporting in clinical trials and progress tracking in the U.S.
This proceedings highlights the presentations and discussions that occurred at the workshop.
Description
A planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will organize a public workshop to explore opportunities to improve racial and ethnic diversity in clinical trials with a focus on system-level change and collective efforts across organizations and sectors that no one entity can effectively take on alone. This workshop builds upon previous meetings hosted by the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative in June 2023, the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard in September 2023, and FasterCures in November 2023.
The public workshop will feature invited presentations and discussions to:
- Explore strategies for equitable participation, including innovative trial designs and partnerships to support community investment, engagement, and workforce development.
- Highlight ways that stakeholders can contribute to sustainable and scalable public awareness campaigns.
- Discuss business plans and funding mechanisms to allocate financial resources to improve clinical trial diversity.
- Consider ways to enable established and developing sites to increase capacity to conduct more equitable and representative clinical trials.
- Examine components of national, interoperable, and accountable systems for collecting and sharing condition-specific demographic data.
The planning committee will organize the workshop, develop the agenda, select and invite speakers and discussants, and moderate or identify moderators for the discussions. A proceedings of the presentations and discussions at the workshop will be prepared by a designated rapporteur in accordance with institutional guidelines.
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