Cancer drugs in the United States are almost exclusively developed by, tested in, and optimized for European- Americans. Disparities in U.S. drug development are the result of long-standing inequalities that occur throughout the entire drug discovery pipeline. Only a small number of basic, translational and clinical scientists are Latino/Hispanic or Black/African-American. Less than 2-5% of trial participants are Latino/Hispanic or Black/African-American. Yet, in spite of a lack of data, new drugs are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and subsequently prescribed for Latino/Hispanic or Black/African-American patients, without sufficient testing. It is unacceptable, especially in this era of the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), that currently our drugs are developed by, and optimized for, only for an exclusive segment of our citizens. We seek to shift this paradigm by strengthening the existing partnership between University of California at Riverside (UCR) and City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center (CoH-CCC). In this proposed P20, UCR and CoH-CCC will partner to develop the resources, infrastructure, and training programs necessary to develop the next generation of therapeutics researchers that reflect the ethnic diversity of Inland Southern California. We anticipate that our P20 program will drive new collaborative R01 grants and K01 and T-type training grants. .
(Overview) In this P20 University of California at Riverside (UCR) and City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center (CoH- CCC) will partner to develop the resources, infrastructure, and training programs necessary to develop the next generation of basic, translational, and clinical therapeutics researchers that reflect the diversity of the Inland Empire. Together, UCR and CoH-CCC aim to develop the collaborations, translational resources, and training programs to reduce disparities in drug development throughout the entire development pipeline.
