When Will Clinical Trials Finally Reflect Diversity?

May 9, 2018

(Nature) – Since the late 1990s, the number of countries contributing to the clinical-trial data used by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve drugs has almost doubled (see ‘Going global’). Yet this global expansion of study locations has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the racial diversity of people enrolled. In 1997, 92% of the participants in these trials were white; in 2014, we found that this figure was still nearly 86%.