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Conducting clinical trials only in India’s large cities is unlikely to sample the country’s ethnicity sufficiently well


Affiliations
1 Indian Statistical Institute, Economics and Planning Unit, Qutub Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 017, India, India
2 Observer Research Foundation, 20, Rouse Avenue Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 002, India, India
3 Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, Biotech Park, Electronics City Phase 1, Bengaluru 560 100, India, India
 

Around the world, there have been calls to include parti­cipants of diverse ethnicities in every clinical trial. In India, some years ago, a Parliamentary Committee was informed that trials are run in cosmopolitan cities of the country, and that this ensured suitable ethnic representation. The Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi, has defined six zones of the country from where sampling needs to be done to ensure good ethnic coverage. We found that no city has adequate representation from all the zones. However, possibly, a suitable sampling strategy in some cities could replace running trials from a few zones

Keywords

Clinical trials, cosmopolitan cities, diversity, ethnicity, sampling strategy.
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Abstract Views: 363

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  • Conducting clinical trials only in India’s large cities is unlikely to sample the country’s ethnicity sufficiently well

Abstract Views: 363  |  PDF Views: 142

Authors

Mudit Kapoor
Indian Statistical Institute, Economics and Planning Unit, Qutub Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 017, India, India
Shamika Ravi
Observer Research Foundation, 20, Rouse Avenue Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 002, India, India
Gayatri Saberwal
Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, Biotech Park, Electronics City Phase 1, Bengaluru 560 100, India, India

Abstract


Around the world, there have been calls to include parti­cipants of diverse ethnicities in every clinical trial. In India, some years ago, a Parliamentary Committee was informed that trials are run in cosmopolitan cities of the country, and that this ensured suitable ethnic representation. The Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi, has defined six zones of the country from where sampling needs to be done to ensure good ethnic coverage. We found that no city has adequate representation from all the zones. However, possibly, a suitable sampling strategy in some cities could replace running trials from a few zones

Keywords


Clinical trials, cosmopolitan cities, diversity, ethnicity, sampling strategy.

References





DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv123%2Fi12%2F1514-1517