Diversity In Clinical Research Execution And Participation

By Denise Calaprice, Ph.D.

The events of the past two years created an urgent and nonnegotiable imperative to increase diversity in clinical research: diversity both in how such studies are executed, and in the types of patients recruited for participation.

As we move forward, industry leaders must synthesize this experience and incorporate its lessons into the clinical operations culture — deciding how much executional diversity to retain, determining how we can maintain diversity in trial participants, and marshalling the motivation of clinical researchers to sustain the effort required for both. In the 2020 WCG Avoca Industry Survey, we began to explore industry respondents’ views on patient diversity in clinical research participation. In 2021, we furthered our research by gathering experiences and views from respondents in a wide variety of industry positions regarding the relative priority and drivers of patient diversity in clinical research participation, as well as their experiences with diversity in clinical research execution and their perceptions of how the two are related.