September 7, 2023 – Thermo Fisher Scientific and the National Minority Quality Forum (NMQF), an independent not-for-profit research and education organization, announced a collaboration to help bring clinical research to historically underserved patient populations through NMQF’s Alliance for Representative Clinical Trials (ARC). The collaboration supports biopharmaceutical and biotech customers in meeting regulatory expectations to enroll and retain patients in clinical trials who more fully reflect real-world populations experiencing the disease or health condition being studied, including FDA requirements around diversity action plans.
The work reflects Thermo Fisher and NMQF’s shared commitment to health equity and building sustainable solutions to engage groups and communities in the United States that have suffered past structural and systemic inequity and/or have been denied access to clinical research for promising new medicines. These include African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics/Latinos and Native Americans, as well as other ethnicities, veterans, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ individuals, religious groups, and those with challenged socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic groups with disparate access to health care.
Participation in clinical trials provides patients with early access to cutting-edge medicines under close medical supervision, while offering treatment options to patients facing a variety of disease diagnoses. ARC is a multi-sponsor public/private program focused on increasing clinical research participation within communities of color and other populations that have been historically underrepresented in clinical trials. Since NMQF’s recently renamed Center for Clinical and Social Research launched ARC in 2022, the program has established clinical research sites in 11 states, including California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The ARC program includes the PI Institute, which trains community clinicians to become clinical trial principal investigators. MyClinical, a for-profit affiliate of the ARC program, is an investigative research network of PI Institute graduates designed to empower independent community clinicians and federal qualified health clinics to facilitate industry-sponsored clinical trials.