Our mission is to accelerate the use of inclusive clinical research to achieve health equity.
Mistrust thrives in ignorance! Strategic Medical Associates (SMA) seeks to elevate America’s knowledge of the clinical development processes for drugs, biologics, medical devices, and vaccines. It is through these efforts that we help improve patient representation in clinical trials to better align the needs of those burdened by disease with the products designed to treat them.
Currently, most clinical trial data supporting drug approvals do not adequately represent the diversity of American disease sufferers. This constitutes a problem since racial and ethnic differences in response to many drugs are known to occur.¹ In fact, most drugs approved annually lack sufficient clinical trials data to inform their safe and effective use in non-white patients.² This is despite non-white patients being over-represented among sufferers of many of the diseases targeted for treatment.
Gaps in data can lead to the routine use of unsafe or ineffective treatments in some patients leading to health disparities. It can also contribute to unnecessary or inappropriate expenditures that impacts us all.
Lack of clinical trial diversity can also mean clinical researchers are denied valuable insights gained from observations and exploration of variations in patient responses. Such observations can contribute to better overall disease understanding and better treatment strategies that benefit all patients and bring us one step closer to the goal of precision medicine.
