Increasing diversity in clinical trials: Demographic trends at the national cancer institute, 2005-2020.

BACKGROUND: We described participant demographics for National Cancer Institute (NCI) clinical trials at the Clinical Center (CC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (NCI-CC participants) to identify enrollment disparities.

METHODS: We analyzed NCI-CC data from 2005-2020, calculated enrollment fractions (EF), compared with the U.S. cancer population represented by the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) cancer incidence data (2018) and the Cancer in North American (CiNA) database (2018), and with clinical trial disparities data from NCI's Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) and National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) (2005-2019), and from ClinicalTrials.gov (2003-2016).

RESULTS: NCI-CC (38,531 participants) had higher EF for older adults (OA) (8.5%), male (5.6%), Non-Hispanic (5.1%), Black/African American (AA) (5.3%) participants; lower women proportion across race and ethnicity; fewer female-sex-specific-cancer (6.8%) than male-sex-specific cancer (11.7%) participants. NCI-CC had lower median age than SEER (54.0 vs 65.4), more AA participants (12.0% vs 11.1%), fewer women (41.7% vs 49.5%), White (76.1% vs 80.5%), Asian/Pacific Islander (AP) (4.6% vs 6.0%), American Indian/Alaska Native (AI) (0.3% vs 0.5%) and Hispanic participants (7.1% vs 13%). NCI-CC had more AA, AP participants, fewer Hispanic participants than the NCORP and NCTN; more AA, Hispanic participants, fewer AP participants than ClinicalTrials.gov data. Improvement was noted for NCI-CC (OA, AA, AP, Hispanic participants).

CONCLUSION: We found lower representation of OA, women, AP, AI, Hispanic vs the U.S. cancer population, higher representation of AA vs U.S. cancer population and oncology clinical trials. Multifaceted efforts are underway to reduce disparities in cancer clinical trials at the NCI-CC.