Photo: Miami Cancer Institute
Manmeet Ahluwalia heads up the Center for Equity in Cancer Care & Research.
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Economic Backbone: Cancer Care
Diversifying Cancer Research
A Baptist Health Cancer Care initiative is boosting minority participation in clinical trials.
Black men face a far greater risk of getting prostate cancer than whites, and they suffer higher mortality rates. Yet, clinical trials for new treatments disproportionately involve white men. Similarly, Black women are more susceptible to dying from triple negative breast cancer than whites, but clinical trials do not represent this.
This kind of demographic imbalance exists throughout all forms of cancer research. Black people represent about 13% of the U.S. population, and Hispanic people are approaching 20%. But combined, they make up less than 10% of the participants in most cancer trials.
Manmeet Ahluwalia, chief scientific officer at the Miami Cancer Institute and head of its year-old Center for Equity in Cancer Care & Research, is trying to change that by identifying more Black and Hispanic patients who qualify for clinical trials and by helping those patients understand the trial process.
The center was funded by a $2-million gift from South Florida philanthropists Trish and Dan Bell.
Ahluwalia is working with faith-based community groups to help raise awareness and build trust. The center also is making sure consent forms and other paperwork are available in Spanish. Patient navigators at the Cancer Institute, which is part of Baptist Health Cancer Care, help build trust with patients and assist in arranging travel and lodging.
The result should be better science. There are genetic differences among various ethnicities, Ahluwalia says. Physicians cannot know whether a drug is an effective cancer treatment, or how significantly they affect the patient’s quality of life, if the trial pools are not sufficiently diverse.
The effort seems to be paying off, Ahluwalia says. Black and Hispanic participation in Miami Cancer Institute trials increased 50% last year, and pharmaceutical companies are taking notice. “It helps us sometimes get higher quality clinical trials.”
The center also has a lung cancer screening program specifically for Hispanic patients. Only 2% of Hispanic patients who need low-dose CT scans get them, Ahluwalia says. He’s working with the American Lung Association “so that we can identify cancer at its early stage when it can be more curable.”
He also is making sure cancerous tissue from Black and Hispanic patients is sent for genetic testing. The genomic information gained could help design better trials, he says, and help doctors understand the different ways tumors behave in patients of different ethnic backgrounds.
It also is part of a national focus, motivated in part by the White House’s cancer moonshot which seeks to cut cancer deaths by half within 25 years.
“We are very excited because we think this is the best way to serve our community and it’s the right thing to do for society at large,” Ahluwalia says.
