IF A drug is not tested on a range of different people, you cannot be sure how widely it will work.
That’s the warning from a 300-strong team of researchers and medical staff led by the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, which examined the origins of clinical trials volunteers in the US. They found that ethnic minorities and the elderly are under-represented, suggesting we need to know more about how drugs work in these groups.
For example, while 60 per cent of all cancers occur in older Americans, only a quarter of those taking part in cancer…
