Black Participants Are Sorely Absent from Medical Research
Black participants are under-represented in clinical research.
After years of suffering from mysterious symptoms, my mother Janice Thomas finally found a doctor who correctly diagnosed her with two autoimmune diseases, Lupus and Sjogren's. Both diseases are more prevalent in the black population than in other races and are often misdiagnosed.
The National Institutes of Health has found that minorities make up less than 10 percent of trial participants.
Like many chronic health conditions, a lack of understanding persists about their causes, individual manifestations, and best treatment strategies.
On the search for relief from chronic pain, my mother started researching options and decided to participate in clinical trials as a way to gain much-needed insights. In return, she received discounted medical testing and has played an active role in finding answers for all.
"When my doctor told me I could get financial or medical benefits from participating in clinical trials for the same test I was already doing, I figured it would be an easy way to get some answers at little to no cost," she says.
As a person of color, her presence in clinical studies is rare. The National Institutes of Health has found that minorities make up less than 10 percent of trial participants.
Without trial participation that is reflective of the general population, pharmaceutical companies and medical professionals are left guessing how various drugs work across racial lines. For example, albuterol, a widely used asthma treatment, was found to have decreased effectiveness for black American and Puerto Rican children. Many high mortality conditions, like cancer, also show different outcomes based on race.
Over the last decade, the pervasive lack of representation has left communities of color demanding higher levels of involvement in the research process. However, no consensus yet exists on how best to achieve this.
But experts suggest that before we can improve black participation in medical studies, key misconceptions must be addressed, such as the false assumption that such patients are unwilling to participate because they distrust scientists.
Jill A. Fisher, a professor in the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, learned in one study that mistrust wasn't the main barrier for black Americans. "There is a lot of evidence that researchers' recruitment of black Americans is generally poorly done, with many black patients simply not asked," Fisher says. "Moreover, the underrepresentation of black Americans is primarily true for efficacy trials - those testing whether an investigational drug might therapeutically benefit patients with specific illnesses."
Without increased minority participation, research will not accurately reflect the diversity of the general population.
Dr. Joyce Balls-Berry, a psychiatric epidemiologist and health educator, agrees that black Americans are often overlooked in the process. One study she conducted found that "enrollment of minorities in clinical trials meant using a variety of culturally appropriate strategies to engage participants," she explained.
To overcome this hurdle, The National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), a faith-based organization made up of 34,000 churches and over 15.7 million African Americans, last year urged the Food and Drug Administration to mandate diversity in all clinical trials before approving a drug or device. However, the FDA declined to implement the mandate, declaring that they don't have the authority to regulate diversity in clinical trials.
"African Americans have not been successfully incorporated into the advancement of medicine and research technologies as legitimate and natural born citizens of this country," admonishes NBCI's president Rev. Anthony Evans.
His words conjure a reminder of the medical system's insidious history for people of color. The most infamous incident is the Tuskegee syphilis scandal, in which white government doctors perpetrated harmful experiments on hundreds of unsuspecting black men for forty years, until the research was shut down in the early 1970s.
Today, in the second decade of twenty-first century, the pernicious narrative that blacks are outsiders in science and medicine must be challenged, says Dr. Danielle N. Lee, assistant professor of biological sciences at Southern Illinois University. And having majority white participants in clinical trials only furthers the notion that "whiteness" is the default.
According to Lee, black individuals often see themselves disconnected from scientific and medical processes. "One of the critiques with science and medical research is that communities of color, and black communities in particular, regard ourselves as outsiders of science," Lee says. "We are othered."
Without increased minority participation, research will not accurately reflect the diversity of the general population.
"We are all human, but we are different, and yes, even different populations of people require modified medical responses," she points out.
Another obstacle is that many trials have health requirements that exclude black Americans, like not wanting individuals who have high blood pressure or a history of stroke. Considering that this group faces health disparities at a higher rate than whites, this eliminates eligibility for millions of potential participants.
One way to increase the diversity in sample participation without an FDA mandate is to include more black Americans in both volunteer and clinical roles during the research process to increase accountability in treatment, education, and advocacy.
"When more of us participate in clinical trials, we help build out the basic data sets that account for health disparities from the start, not after the fact," Lee says. She also suggests that researchers involve black patient representatives throughout the clinical trial process, from the study design to the interpretation of results.
"This allows for the black community to give insight on how to increase trial enrollment and help reduce stigma," she explains.
Thankfully, partnerships are popping up like the one between The Howard University's Cancer Center and Driver, a platform that connects cancer patients to treatment and trials. These sorts of targeted and culturally tailored efforts allow black patients to receive assistance from well-respected organizations.
Some observers suggest that the federal government and pharmaceutical industries must step up to address the gap.
However, some experts say that the black community should not be held solely responsible for solving a problem it did not cause. Instead, some observers suggest that the federal government and pharmaceutical industries must step up to address the gap.
According to Balls-Berry, socioeconomic barriers like transportation, time off work, and childcare related to trial participation must be removed. "These are real-world issues and yet many times researchers have not included these things in their budgets."
When asked to comment, a spokesperson for BIO, the world's largest biotech trade association, emailed the following statement:
"BIO believes that that our members' products and services should address the needs of a diverse population, and enhancing participation in clinical trials by a diverse patient population is a priority for BIO and our member companies. By investing in patient education to improve awareness of clinical trial opportunities, we can reduce disparities in clinical research to better reflect the country's changing demographics."
For my mother, the patient suffering from autoimmune disease, the need for broad participation in medical research is clear. "Without clinical trials, we would have less diagnosis and solutions to diseases," she says. "I think it's an underutilized resource."
Breakthrough therapies are breaking patients' banks. Key changes could improve access, experts say.
Single-treatment therapies are revolutionizing medicine. But insurers and patients wonder whether they can afford treatment and, if they can, whether the high costs are worthwhile.
CSL Behring’s new gene therapy for hemophilia, Hemgenix, costs $3.5 million for one treatment, but helps the body create substances that allow blood to clot. It appears to be a cure, eliminating the need for other treatments for many years at least.
Likewise, Novartis’s Kymriah mobilizes the body’s immune system to fight B-cell lymphoma, but at a cost $475,000. For patients who respond, it seems to offer years of life without the cancer progressing.
These single-treatment therapies are at the forefront of a new, bold era of medicine. Unfortunately, they also come with new, bold prices that leave insurers and patients wondering whether they can afford treatment and, if they can, whether the high costs are worthwhile.
“Most pharmaceutical leaders are there to improve and save people’s lives,” says Jeremy Levin, chairman and CEO of Ovid Therapeutics, and immediate past chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. If the therapeutics they develop are too expensive for payers to authorize, patients aren’t helped.
“The right to receive care and the right of pharmaceuticals developers to profit should never be at odds,” Levin stresses. And yet, sometimes they are.
Leigh Turner, executive director of the bioethics program, University of California, Irvine, notes this same tension between drug developers that are “seeking to maximize profits by charging as much as the market will bear for cell and gene therapy products and other medical interventions, and payers trying to control costs while also attempting to provide access to medical products with promising safety and efficacy profiles.”
Why Payers Balk
Health insurers can become skittish around extremely high prices, yet these therapies often accompany significant overall savings. For perspective, the estimated annual treatment cost for hemophilia exceeds $300,000. With Hemgenix, payers would break even after about 12 years.
But, in 12 years, will the patient still have that insurer? Therein lies the rub. U.S. payers, are used to a “pay-as-you-go” model, in which the lifetime costs of therapies typically are shared by multiple payers over many years, as patients change jobs. Single treatment therapeutics eliminate that cost-sharing ability.
"As long as formularies are based on profits to middlemen…Americans’ healthcare costs will continue to skyrocket,” says Patricia Goldsmith, the CEO of CancerCare.
“There is a phenomenally complex, bureaucratic reimbursement system that has grown, layer upon layer, during several decades,” Levin says. As medicine has innovated, payment systems haven’t kept up.
Therefore, biopharma companies begin working with insurance companies and their pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which act on an insurer’s behalf to decide which drugs to cover and by how much, early in the drug approval process. Their goal is to make sophisticated new drugs available while still earning a return on their investment.
New Payment Models
Pay-for-performance is one increasingly popular strategy, Turner says. “These models typically link payments to evidence generation and clinically significant outcomes.”
A biotech company called bluebird bio, for example, offers value-based pricing for Zynteglo, a $2.8 million possible cure for the rare blood disorder known as beta thalassaemia. It generally eliminates patients’ need for blood transfusions. The company is so sure it works that it will refund 80 percent of the cost of the therapy if patients need blood transfusions related to that condition within five years of being treated with Zynteglo.
In his February 2023 State of the Union speech, President Biden proposed three pilot programs to reduce drug costs. One of them, the Cell and Gene Therapy Access Model calls on the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to establish outcomes-based agreements with manufacturers for certain cell and gene therapies.
A mortgage-style payment system is another, albeit rare, approach. Amortized payments spread the cost of treatments over decades, and let people change employers without losing their healthcare benefits.
Only about 14 percent of all drugs that enter clinical trials are approved by the FDA. Pharma companies, therefore, have an exigent need to earn a profit.
The new payment models that are being discussed aren’t solutions to high prices, says Bill Kramer, senior advisor for health policy at Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH), a nonprofit that seeks to lower health care costs. He points out that innovative pricing models, although well-intended, may distract from the real problem of high prices. They are attempts to “soften the blow. The best thing would be to charge a reasonable price to begin with,” he says.
Instead, he proposes making better use of research on cost and clinical effectiveness. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) conducts such research in the U.S., determining whether the benefits of specific drugs justify their proposed prices. ICER is an independent non-profit research institute. Its reports typically assess the degrees of improvement new therapies offer and suggest prices that would reflect that. “Publicizing that data is very important,” Kramer says. “Their results aren’t used to the extent they could and should be.” Pharmaceutical companies tend to price their therapies higher than ICER’s recommendations.
Drug Development Costs Soar
Drug developers have long pointed to the onerous costs of drug development as a reason for high prices.
A 2020 study found the average cost to bring a drug to market exceeded $1.1 billion, while other studies have estimated overall costs as high as $2.6 billion. The development timeframe is about 10 years. That’s because modern therapeutics target precise mechanisms to create better outcomes, but also have high failure rates. Only about 14 percent of all drugs that enter clinical trials are approved by the FDA. Pharma companies, therefore, have an exigent need to earn a profit.
Skewed Incentives Increase Costs
Pricing isn’t solely at the discretion of pharma companies, though. “What patients end up paying has much more to do with their PBMs than the actual price of the drug,” Patricia Goldsmith, CEO, CancerCare, says. Transparency is vital.
PBMs control patients’ access to therapies at three levels, through price negotiations, pricing tiers and pharmacy management.
When negotiating with drug manufacturers, Goldsmith says, “PBMs exchange a preferred spot on a formulary (the insurer’s or healthcare provider’s list of acceptable drugs) for cash-base rebates.” Unfortunately, 25 percent of the time, those rebates are not passed to insurers, according to the PBGH report.
Then, PBMs use pricing tiers to steer patients and physicians to certain drugs. For example, Kramer says, “Sometimes PBMs put a high-cost brand name drug in a preferred tier and a lower-cost competitor in a less preferred, higher-cost tier.” As the PBGH report elaborates, “(PBMs) are incentivized to include the highest-priced drugs…since both manufacturing rebates, as well as the administrative fees they charge…are calculated as a percentage of the drug’s price.
Finally, by steering patients to certain pharmacies, PBMs coordinate patients’ access to treatments, control patients’ out-of-pocket costs and receive management fees from the pharmacies.
Therefore, Goldsmith says, “As long as formularies are based on profits to middlemen…Americans’ healthcare costs will continue to skyrocket.”
Transparency into drug pricing will help curb costs, as will new payment strategies. What will make the most impact, however, may well be the development of a new reimbursement system designed to handle dramatic, breakthrough drugs. As Kramer says, “We need a better system to identify drugs that offer dramatic improvements in clinical care.”
In today's podcast episode, law professor Gaia Bernstein talks about the challenges of keeping control over our thoughts and actions, even when some powerful forces are pushing in the other direction.
Each afternoon, kids walk through my neighborhood, on their way back home from school, and almost all of them are walking alone, staring down at their phones. It's a troubling site. This daily parade of the zombie children just can’t bode well for the future.
That’s one reason I felt like Gaia Bernstein’s new book was talking directly to me. A law professor at Seton Hall, Gaia makes a strong argument that people are so addicted to tech at this point, we need some big, system level changes to social media platforms and other addictive technologies, instead of just blaming the individual and expecting them to fix these issues.
Gaia’s book is called Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies. It’s fascinating and I had a chance to talk with her about it for today’s podcast. At its heart, our conversation is really about how and whether we can maintain control over our thoughts and actions, even when some powerful forces are pushing in the other direction.
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We discuss the idea that, in certain situations, maybe it's not reasonable to expect that we’ll be able to enjoy personal freedom and autonomy. We also talk about how to be a good parent when it sometimes seems like our kids prefer to be raised by their iPads; so-called educational video games that actually don’t have anything to do with education; the root causes of tech addictions for people of all ages; and what kinds of changes we should be supporting.
Gaia is Seton’s Hall’s Technology, Privacy and Policy Professor of Law, as well as Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection, and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute of Law Science and Technology. She’s the founding director of the Institute for Privacy Protection. She created and spearheaded the Institute’s nationally recognized Outreach Program, which educated parents and students about technology overuse and privacy.
Professor Bernstein's scholarship has been published in leading law reviews including the law reviews of Vanderbilt, Boston College, Boston University, and U.C. Davis. Her work has been selected to the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum and received extensive media coverage. Gaia joined Seton Hall's faculty in 2004. Before that, she was a fellow at the Engelberg Center of Innovation Law & Policy and at the Information Law Institute of the New York University School of Law. She holds a J.S.D. from the New York University School of Law, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and a J.D. from Boston University.
Gaia’s work on this topic is groundbreaking I hope you’ll listen to the conversation and then consider pre-ordering her new book. It comes out on March 28.
