Beth Snyder Bulik
Senior Editor

The American Lung Association is doubling down on efforts to encourage more Black Americans to join lung cancer clinical trials.
The new pharma-sponsored “Awareness, Trust and Action” initiative aims to put those three words into action with a national campaign that includes digital posts and social media. The first posts are slated to go up on Saturday, which is Clinical Trials Awareness Day.
Daiichi Sankyo, Genentech, Merck, Novartis and Novocure provided financial support for the project.
Cedric “Jamie” Rutland
“We have to do a better job of recruiting Black Americans into clinical trials and letting them know why,” said pulmonologist Cedric “Jamie” Rutland, a national volunteer medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association. “And not only that, but teaching Black Americans what lung cancer is, what the risk factors are, why they have risk factors living in heavily polluted areas … We have to do a better job education everyone, but especially minorities.”

The three-pronged approach for driving awareness — addressing misconceptions and mistrust and empowering Black people to take action by talking to a doctor about trials — will focus on urban areas where lung cancer is prevalent. Those include Dallas, Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis and Washington, DC, Rutland said.

He noted that the association has long worked on more diversity in clinical trials, but it’s especially important now, emphasized by healthcare inequities during the pandemic and more recent human rights issues.

“It’s important to target Black Americans who look like me who have any disease, whether it’s lung cancer or anything else, to be involved in clinical trials. But lung cancer specifically, because Black Americans are more typically diagnosed in stage three or stage four, instead of stage one,” he said. “We’re less likely to have surgeries, and we’re less likely to have the best, sought-after therapies.”

The campaign tackles awareness and education but also the fear and mistrust that many Black Americans have in the medical system and clinical trials in general.