VIDEO: Addressing disparities in multiple myeloma clinical trials

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

It's a great question. You know we, in multiple myeloma, suffer from disparities that affect African American patients with multiple myeloma, where it's the most common hematological cancer in African Americans. And unfortunately, so far we have lower representation of African Americans in clinical trials of multiple myeloma, and as we recently reported, in even CAR T-cell therapy in multiple myeloma. I think the solution is to try to enforce regulations to get a certain number of African Americans enrolled in clinical trials before giving any product or drug an FDA approval. This will be important for many reasons. First, we can make sure that the results we found is applicable to the patients we are treating, by having a similar percentage of enrollment in clinical trials and how prevalent is the disease. Since we have many of those trials run worldwide, I think for the patients who are enrolled in the US we need to make sure that this percentage is achieved before we allow any approval. Many of the pharmaceutical companies nowadays try to keep the trials open for a longer period of time to enroll more African American patients. So those trials will be open only for African American patients, and I think that's a positive thing because that will allow more time to get more African American patients enrolled into those clinical trials, and achieve this certain threshold that we are all looking for. I think the last thing I would mention is to try to open clinical trials in areas of need. We found that many of clinical trials that are open in the US, for example, for those immune-based approaches in myeloma are not open nearby, you know counties to states that serve a large, you know, percentage of African American patients. So I think that's also very important to have this access component available for patients.