The Black Breast Cancer Alliance drives the collaborative efforts of patients, survivors, advocates, advocacy organizations, health care professionals, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies to work collectively and with accountability towards the common goal of eradicating Black Breast Cancer.
In our committed efforts to advance the science for Black Breast Cancer towards reducing the devastating mortality rate for Black Women, we are ecstatic to launch TOUCH Care.
TOUCH Care is the first ever breast cancer advocacy-led program to provide a nurse navigator service to support Black breast cancer patients in clinical trials. Our preemptive TOUCH Care program includes supporting our clinical trial partners with the development of culturally-agile patient recruiting materials, training trial staff to effectively engage and support Black Breasties, and providing Breastie-led nurse navigation to support patients throughout trials.
Led by TOUCH’s co-founder Valarie Worthy, MSN, RN—a 20+ year breast cancer survivor/thriver and Patient Navigator Manager at Duke Cancer Center—TOUCH Care will address both the logistical and the emotional barriers to clinical trial participation by Black women in real time. The TOUCH Care team works with pharmaceutical partners, researchers, and investigators to curate patient-centric trial experiences. The TOUCH Care program seeks to provide culturally-informed support to Black women diagnosed with breast cancer through the clinical trial interest, screening, enrollment, and treatment process with the ultimate goal of increasing Black women’s participation and retention in breast cancer clinical trials.
TOUCH, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance (TOUCHBBCA) and Unite for HER announce a strategic alliance to bring stellar culturally agile care to Black women in breast cancer clinical trials. Join us for The Doctor Is In as we launch our partnership! Here’s our press release:
Unite For HER Brings Integrative Services to TOUCH,
The Black Breast Cancer Alliance’s Pre-emptive Breast Cancer
Clinical Trial Recruitment & Retention Program
With an ever-growing breadth of supportive services,
the TOUCH Care program aims to move the needle
on addressing breast cancer clinical trial disparities
for Black women.
TOUCH, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance has partnered with Carebox to provide Breasties, caregivers, and the entire Black community with an easy way to search and match to breast cancer clinical trials.
RALEIGH, N.C., January 16, 2024 (Newswire.com) – Carebox, a leading provider of clinical trial matching solutions, and the TOUCH, the Black Breast Cancer Alliance – which drives the collaborative efforts of patients, survivors, advocates, advocacy organizations, health care professionals, researchers and pharmaceutical companies to work collectively, with accountability, towards the common goal of eradicating Black Breast Cancer – today announced the launch of a Carebox Connect experience optimized for breast cancer patients.
The new web application gives patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals an easy and effective way to search and match to breast cancer clinical trials.
Carebox Connect can now be accessed from the When We Tri(al) website as an integral part of the movement to increase the participation of Black women in clinical trials. Black women are 41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. Black women continue to be vastly underrepresented in clinical trials, accounting for only 3% of the clinical trial participants leading to FDA approval of cancer drugs between 2008 and 2018. Because the vast majority of people who participate in clinical trials are white, there simply is not enough research about how breast cancer treatments work for Black women or how they experience breast cancer differently. When We Tri(al) is a call to action of a fierce, resilient community of Black women and has successfully garnered over 15,000 Black women into clinical trial portals in the past year.
The Carebox Connect trial database is synchronized daily with the ClinicalTrials.gov clinical trial data maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Applying its human-supervised AI, Carebox converts the unstructured text in ClinicalTrials.gov that describes eligibility criteria for enrollment into a searchable index of clinical criteria for matching with patient characteristics. This allows patients and families to complete a questionnaire about their particular diagnosis, treatment history, genetic testing, and other relevant information to then identify potentially relevant clinical trials automatically.
When We Tri(al) is about educating Black women
about research with words they can spell from voices they can trust …
The questionnaire-based trial matching approach
of Carebox Connect makes clinical research more accessible
to our community.
Ricki Fairley
CEO and Co-Founder
TOUCH, the Black Breast Cancer Alliance
We are on a mission
to advance the science for Black Breast Cancer.
We must get more Black Breasties into clinical trials
to get drugs that have been tested on our bodies.
When We Tri(al) is about educating Black women
about research with words they can spell
from voices they can trust.
We are ecstatic to partner with Carebox.
The questionnaire-based trial matching approach
of Carebox Connect
makes clinical research more accessible
to our community and gives us information
to measure our impact.
Caroline Daigle, Carebox VP of Services, adds:
Increasing diversity in clinical trial participants
is an FDA mandate
and top-of-mind for our pharma company customers
that sponsor clinical trials.
Objectives for diversity and inclusion can only be achieved
when the drug research industry partners
with leading communities of patients
like the Black Breasties of TOUCHBBCA.
Our digital platform and call center navigators
reach tens of thousands of patients
every month in every community
and segment of the patient populations for all conditions.
Every partner we add to the Carebox Connect Network
extends that reach
and brings the treatment options
available only in clinical trials
to the broadest audience.
We are proud to be able to support the wonderful work
of TOUCHBBCA and will continue
to expand our network of partners
to reach as many patients as possible,
especially those that have historically been underserved.
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