Barriers in Achieving Representative Psoriasis Clinical Trials

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, LaShell Robinson, head of global feasibility and trial equity at Takeda, discusses strategies to address underrepresentation in clinical trials, particularly in phase III psoriasis trials. Robinson also discusses the company's partnerships with community stakeholders like Inside Edge, Black Health Matters, and Hispanic Communication Global Network to improve engagement, address operational barriers, and prioritize sites with diverse patient demographics. Takeda has also enhanced investigator diversity through multilingual toolkits and educational sessions, and aims to expand these efforts globally by adapting strategies to regional needs.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What are some of the key barriers you've identified in achieving representative clinical trials, and how are you overcoming them?

LaShell Robinson: For the Hispanic and Asian communities in particular, one of the largest aspects was the lack of translated materials in their native language. One of the gaps that we closed was providing translated materials, and we're hoping to really help overcome the barrier around health literacy. As a standard practice, since 2023, we automatically translate all of our clinical trial materials that are patient facing into Spanish. This is before a site requests it and it has helped close the gap and had a positive impact on connecting with the Hispanic community. Moving forward, that's the same strategy that we are looking to expand for other multilingual audiences.

Second, to better reach and engage with underserved populations, we have partnerships with Inside Edge, Black Health Matters, and Hispanic Global Communications Network. Since they have a lot of trust already built with the community, it made it very nice to partner with them to do some of these educational aspects. We also use that as a mechanism to record videos. For example, we heard from sites that they wanted another mechanism to talk about clinical research in a general aspect and a video would be nice. We worked with Inside Edge and one of our principal investigators that was on the trial to develop a video in English and Spanish that they could use with potential patients to just get them comfortable with research and share that information.

In the development of our patient facing materials, specifically for psoriasis, we knew imagery was one of the core issues, so we wanted to make sure that our patient materials also included multicultural visuals. That came into play largely when we started seeing that our Asian population was lagging behind in the execution of the trial. We had already had this discussion and proactive planning, so we were able to use the imagery to enhance our social media and digital outreach, and connect with our sites that we knew were in closer proximity to the Asian patient communities to start addressing that lagging behind in real time. That turned out well, because we were able to meet that particular trial metric.

All of these different aspects, when we're talking about challenges and barriers, become very important to be able to have that proactive plan. You can address these issues in real time and look at them from a holistic standpoint, instead of waiting till the end of the trial, or waiting until the trial is already in flight, and then trying to fit a solution on the fly.