Breast Cancer Trial Enrollment Illustrates Diversity Challenge

A growing number of companies have been publicizing efforts to improve diversity in their clinical trials, highlighting moves like partnerships with community organizations and locating trial sites in areas where they are more likely to recruit racially and ethnically diverse participants. But looking at trial demographics in a particular therapeutic area highlights the scope of the problem they are trying to address, namely the historical tendency to enroll trial populations that are predominantly white and affluent.

Roche Holding AG’s Genentech division, for example, has been enlisting trial sites for its inclusive research initiative in the...