Table 4: Representation of race/ethnicity in prostate
cancer clinical trials using personalized therapy
In the last decade, there has been unprecedented progress in treatment
options for patients with prostate cancer resulting in an ever-growing
range of options. This raises the question of whether these are all the
right options for individual patients to receive optimal therapy.
Unfortunately, despite new advances in the field, the representation of
African American men in these clinical trials to determine ethnic
differences in clinical benefit remains inadequate92,93.
Examining the trials activated after 2016, we found that the inclusion
of African American patients remains low (<5%) compared to
that of European American patients in prostate cancer clinical trial for
precision oncology, even reaching 0 recruitment of African American
patients as in the trial NCT03093428 (Table 4). The future personalized
treatment of PCa is based on these ongoing clinical trials, so the
deficit in enrollment of African American participants might inhibit the
generalization of the result to this subgroup of patients. Therefore,
this existing disparity may have an impact on the potential benefit in
survival, quality of life, and optimal therapies for African American
patients.
Approximately 12% of men in the United States are African
American92. Since AAM have twice the risk of
developing PCa compared to EAM, a proposed representation could be 24%
in clinical trials. However, the current average enrollment of AAM to
prostate cancer clinical trials overall is only around
3%92,93. In only one of the trials that we analyzed,
the number of AAM patients included did exceed that percentage, but this
was not the case in the rest.