Plenty of data in clinical trials, except on race

Diversity in clinical trials is increasingly recognized as being crucial to any rigorous study. Medications may have different efficacy rates depending on a patient’s race or ethnicity. But one-third of the clinical trials that led to new cancer drugs approved between 2008 and 2018 didn’t report on the race of participants, STAT’s Megan Thielking writes.

A new JAMA Oncology study examined 230 clinical trials for drugs that were approved by the FDA. Only 18 parsed the data into four major racial groups: white, Asian, black, and Hispanic. And the trials that did report on race showed substantial disparities in the trial makeup. White patients accounted for an average of 76% of the participants; Asians represented 18%, while Hispanics were 6% and blacks just 3% of the cancer trial participants.

“It’s important to recognize that this problem is there and this problem is persisting over the years,” said Dr. Kanwal Raghav, an oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center and an author of the study.