Cancer biomarker data is not diverse, with implications for immunotherapy patients from underrepresented groups.
Cancer immunotherapy is a promising new treatment for the disease, but the lack of diversity in clinical trials data may mean that patients from underrepresented groups don’t benefit from the therapy as much as they could.
A new study has found that the biomarker data used to select patients for immunotherapy trials is not diverse, with fewer trials being conducted in patients from underrepresented groups.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, have implications for the way clinical trials are designed and conducted, and how patients are selected for treatment.
The study looked at data from 4,725 clinical trials of immunotherapy drugs that were registered on ClinicalTrials.gov between 2009 and 2018.
The vast majority of these trials (92.5%) were conducted in patients with lung cancer, melanoma, or breast cancer.
Importantly, the data showed that patients from underrepresented groups were significantly less likely to be enrolled in immunotherapy clinical trials.
For example, only 2.6% of trials were conducted in patients with head and neck cancer, even though this type of cancer is more common in African Americans, a population that is underrepresented in clinical trials.
The authors say that the lack of diversity in clinical trials data is a major problem, as it means that patients from underrepresented groups are less likely to benefit from immunotherapy.
In particular, the lack of data on patients from underrepresented groups means that it is difficult to assess the efficacy of immunotherapy in these populations.
The authors call for more effort to be made to increase the diversity of clinical trials, and to ensure that patients from all backgrounds have access to the latest treatments.
A new study has found that cancer biomarker data is not as diverse as it should be, with implications for immunotherapy patients from underrepresented groups.
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, analyzed data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and found that nearly two-thirds of all patients in the dataset were of European descent. When the researchers looked at data from immunotherapy clinical trials, they found that even though the trials were designed to be diverse, the patients enrolled were largely of European descent.
This lack of diversity has implications for patients from underrepresented groups who may not respond to immunotherapy as well as patients of European descent. The study’s authors say that more research is needed to understand why this is the case and to develop new therapies that are effective for all patients, regardless of their ancestry.
