“The COVID pandemic, combined with growing support for racial justice, has brought the issue of inequity in health care to the fore,” Dr. Saba Sile, Executive Director of Clinical Development at BIO member Horizon Therapeutics, writes in Scientific American. She explains how clinical trial diversity and genetic research can help us eliminate these disparities.
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care have been “well documented,” writes Dr. Sile, who is developing medicines for rare, autoimmune, and severe inflammatory diseases. “Systemic racism clearly plays a major role, as do socioeconomics, environment, and culture.”
“Although race is a social rather than biological construct, there are inherited genetic variations that play a role in drug response and adverse drug reactions—and genetic variations differ among different ethnicities," she continues.
For example: Black children are twice as likely to have asthma as white children, yet “the most commonly prescribed medication for asthma, albuterol, may not always be as effective for people with African ancestry as it is for people of European descent,” Dr. Sile explains. “With a better understanding of genetic variations that contribute to these differences, we may be able to provide more effective treatments.”
This is why we need “an industry-wide commitment on racial diversity in clinical trials,” and “to design clinical trials to reflect the real-world distribution of a disease—so if a certain percentage of people with a disease are Black, the industry should recruit that same percentage of Black participants for a trial researching that disease.”
“We also need increased research into racial differences in disease manifestation, and understanding how socioeconomics, ancestry, ethnicity, and other factors come into play.”
And we need more Black physicians and researchers—something BIO’s working on, too.
Read the whole thing—and learn more about Dr. Sile and her work here.
One more thing before you go...
Hans Sauer, BIO’s Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property, published a blog post today on IP Watchdog about the need for IP protections to enable companies to work on development of COVID-19 vaccines. While India, South Africa, and some members of the U.S. Senate claim a waiver of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) would facilitate vaccine development, Hans explains the unworkability of such a waiver from a legal perspective. IP has allowed for great strides in vaccine development so far—and there is no credible example of a situation where IP rights have hindered development.
We’ll have more on this issue tomorrow—stay tuned.
