How Black Clinical Trial Participation Can End Health Care Inequalities – BlackDoctor.org [Video]

New medical treatments often come with great promise, but sometimes that promise doesn’t fully extend to Black Americans. “Populations of humans sometimes respond differently to different drugs,” said Dr. Pierre Theodore, Executive Director Health Equity at Genentech Roche, in a Facebook Live video on clinical trials with BDO.

“That can be sometimes because of genetic backgrounds or differences in one population versus another from a genetic perspective.” He added that “Often, it’s also the social environments and the different drivers that one population may be faced with versus another one.”

In other words, both genetics and environmental factors can cause a drug to impact one group differently than another. As Dr. Theodore noted, “We can’t even always tease apart how much of that is driven by genetics and how much of that is driven by environmental factors.”