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- It is so important to have diversity
in medical research for many reasons.
We are a diverse community, in our country,
and we need to have a diverse
population in our medical research.
- When we study certain conditions,
certain cancers and we only use one population
we find out a lot about that population,
but it says nothing about other populations.
They could be exactly the same.
But they could be also markedly different.
This has been shown time and time again
in some other research areas.
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- It's not so much the ethnicity.
It's being able to have patients
who have a broad range of types of diseases,
for instance in breast cancer.
Breast cancer cells are not smart enough
to know if a person is white, or black, or Hispanic.
But those cells are smart enough to know
the certain pathways that allow them to grow.
If we can have patients in our studies
that have these pathways,
and we then see the effect of our new agents
on these pathways we benefit women of all ethnicities.
When we talk about clinical trials,
we have the best standard treatment,
and we're comparing it to the most promising treatment.
- We're a site that does a lot of these
newer therapies that aren't necessarily
fully FDA approved yet but show great promise.
- These are treatments that have already
been tested in earlier trials,
and have been shown to be extremely well tolerated,
and probably will give better results than the standard.
But we won't know until we compare
it head to head in a trial.
- The expected number of under represented
minorities in trials is a little lower than expected.
And it's not for necessarily a lack of trying,
but it might be a lack of going into the right communities
to recruit those types of patients.
There's some historical barriers
that prevent people from enrolling in trials,
largely because they're afraid.
Some of them are, I don't wanna participate,
you're gonna use me as a farm animal,
or something like that.
I've heard things, particularly for older patients,
particularly African Americans,
that they remember the Tuskegee issues.
- I think, depending on your age,
the Tuskegee incident really carried a lot of weight.
- When they did that experiment
and then didn't tell the gentlemen
that they were being used as an experiment,
and that kind of negativity hangs
around for years and years.
It was a long time ago.
Race relations were different then.
Everything changes, if you live, things change.
I think that you can stay in the past,
and not get involved in anything,
or else you can make a conscious decision
that in order for us to go forward
you may be asked to participate
so that medicine can move forward.
- I will tell you that if a patient
gets into the UMA system, and I or my colleagues care,
they will provide the best care they can.
- We accept all patients.
We want all patients.
We encourage all patients to come
to the university of Michigan.
We are a very welcoming institution.
Everyone wants to be cured of their disease.
And the clinical trials gives everyone
equal opportunity to do so.
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