Medical World News® Inside the Practice: CancerNetwork® With Quita Highsmith and Monica Baskin, MD, on Diversifying Clinical Trial Participation

For the latest installment of the Inside the Practice Segment of the Medical World News® broadcast, CancerNetwork® spoke with Quita Highsmith, Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at Genentech, as well as Monica Baskin, MD, professor of Preventive Medicine and associate director for Community Outreach and Engagement at the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, to discuss how the Advancing Inclusive Research Alliance will be implemented in cancer centers.

Highsmith spoke about how the 4 inaugural centers—the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, West Cancer Center, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Mays Cancer Center—were purposely chosen to kick-off the alliance based on their locations in areas with a high rate of minority patients. In choosing these locations, she said the centers would be more likely to reach their enrollment goal for including a more diverse trial population. She also emphasized that low minority involvement with clinical trials is the responsibility of the medical system that fails to cater to diverse populations.

At O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, Baskin is remodeling the way patients access trials by reaching out to smaller cancer centers and local oncologists to make the community more aware of the alliance and its initiative.

Additionally, these 4 institutions continue to build trust within their community by maintaining diverse leadership. Overall, Highsmith emphasized that having a more diverse staff of physicians will allow for more patients overall to feel comfortable participating in clinical trials.

This segment comes from the CancerNetwork® portion of the MJH Life Sciences™ Medical World News®, airing daily on all MJH Life Sciences™ channels.