Biotech

Enhancing Clinical Trials with More Diverse Recruitment

Rebecca Willumson: 
Hi there. I'm Rebecca Willumson. I'm the publisher of Fierce Biotech and I'm here today with Dr. Kenneth Park, SVP and General Manager of Life Sciences Solutions at Clarify Health. Ken, thanks so much for joining me today.

Kenneth Park:
Thanks so much, Rebecca.

Rebecca Willumson:
So Ken, to start us off, can you share a little bit about your background and your role at Clarify Health?

Kenneth Park:
Sure. So my background, I had a bit of a meandering career exploring different parts of the healthcare industry. I originally started off as a clinical trial coordinator, fresh out college, made my way through med school. Joined management consulting with McKinsey & Company for seven years, heading up and co-leading their big data and healthcare work, before joining Anthem for two years to lead their faculty of strategy. I spent seven, six years actually over at IQVIA, heading up in innovation organization, their [inaudible 00:01:02] business, including launching and managing their global genomics business before eventually landing at Clarify, where I've been for the last year and a half-ish now, heading up their life sciences business, managing everything from what products do we design and build and sell to how do we actually bring it to market, and how do we deliver it to our clients. It's been an exciting journey.

Rebecca Willumson:
Tell me, where do you see the biggest need for innovation in the biotech sector?

Kenneth Park:
Sure. So I think that there's a real need to change how biotech engages with diverse communities. In particular, historically, biotech and the broader pharmaceutical industry as a whole has continued to fail to recruit diversification populations. We took a look actually at Clarify at a couple of clinical trials our clients were running. What we saw was that their clinical trial sites only captured about, recovered about 20% of the disease population in the US geographically.

But then when we double-clicked in and looked closer, what we saw was that the trial sites themselves, they were only touching about 20% of patients in those geographies, or 4% of the disease population in the US. And that 4% skewed heavily towards white, higher education, higher income, that are able to take off four to six hours every two weeks for a traditional site visit. And what all of this means is that we continue as an industry to not have a great understanding of how medicines work in diverse patient groups. So what I see as a first stage of innovation in the space is really focusing on how do we recruit and enroll these underrepresented patient groups into clinical trials.

Rebecca Willumson:
So tell me, how have you seen companies create value given the current state of the industry?

Kenneth Park:
I've seen some companies focus on where to select sites geographically to maximize patient diversity. I've seen others trying to focus on recruiting principal investigators who are people of color. One of the more exciting approaches I've seen is being done by companies working to improve the operational effectiveness of individual trial sites by providing site infrastructure and management services. At Clarify, we've really been focusing on understanding how diverse communities engage with our healthcare to identify touchpoints for clinical trial recruitment.

Rebecca Willumson:
So to close this out, can tell me what's one thing that you would completely change in the industry if you could?

Kenneth Park:
Push the industry to stop thinking of clinical trial participants as disconnected individuals. Each person participating in a trial is part of a broader community that interacts with each other and is involved with each other. If industry's going to improve engagement with diverse populations, it's important to start engaging with them as a community. I've seen how that shift in mindset can completely change not just how the clinical trial site reaches out, but actually how the entire community reaches back and starts to both own their healthcare as well as become involved in what does research mean for them as well as for their family.

Rebecca Willumson:
All. All right. Well, that's all the questions that I have. Dr. Park, thank you so much for joining me today.

Kenneth Park:
Thank you.

The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.