Clinical Trials Uncovered: Building Trust in the Black Community

One of the things I think has been a tremendous barrier in participation to research has been trust and awareness. If we look back a little bit, we can understand where the issues around trust perhaps started. We know about the Tuskegee experiments – the Tuskegee syphilis experiments – where blacks were infected with syphilis and were watched what happened to them over the years.

This experiment, which today we would never perform, served as an important jumpstart to us looking at clinical research to ensure that people’s rights and safety are guaranteed.

So one of the things we do here at Science 37 is we make people aware and we get involved in communities. And we build communities of people who want to participate in research so that we can bring that trust back and demonstrate that not only can we expose individuals who participate in clinical research to novel treatments, but we can do it safely and ethically and in a way that people get to participate out of the comfort of their own homes.

One of the things I think has been a tremendous barrier in participation to research has been trust and awareness. If we look back a little bit, we can understand where the issues around trust perhaps started. We know about the Tuskegee experiments – the Tuskegee syphilis experiments – where blacks were infected with syphilis and were watched what happened to them over the years.

This experiment, which today we would never perform, served as an important jumpstart to us looking at clinical research to ensure that people’s rights and safety are guaranteed.

So one of the things we do here at Science 37 is we make people aware and we get involved in communities. And we build communities of people who want to participate in research so that we can bring that trust back and demonstrate that not only can we expose individuals who participate in clinical research to novel treatments, but we can do it safely and ethically and in a way that people get to participate out of the comfort of their own homes.