74 - Kwaku Owusu - CEO of DrugViu - Eliminating the Underrepresentation of POC in Clinical Trials

Summary: Today’s episode is one I co-hosted with Mariam Alausa, who is the current co-VP of Curriculum for Penn HealthX. Our guest was Kwaku Owusu, who is the founder and CEO of DrugViu and TrialViu. Drugviu aggregates patient-related outcomes for people of color who take specific pharmaceutical drugs. TrialViu is a companion site that then educates those same patients about clinical trials, and then matches them to trials they may qualify for using AI. Their lofty mission is to eliminate underrepresentation in medicine Reading from DrugViu’s website to share more about the problem they are looking to solve: Racial and ethnic minorities are 40% of the US population and growing, yet represent less than 8% of the participants in pharmaceutical clinical trials. Especially concerning are clinical trials for diseases that disproportionately affect minorities. Here are few more examples: Per the National Cancer Institute, African-American men are twice as likely as their white counterparts to die from prostate cancer but represent 4% of clinical trial participants. The CDC reports that suicide is one of the leading causes of death among Asian-American women under 45 years of age. Yet, Asian-Americans constituted less than 1% of trials for CDER-approved treatments of major depressive disorders in the last two years. Cancer is the leading cause of death among Hispanics, yet Hispanic cancer patients only make up 4% of participants in cancer clinical trials in the U.S., according to the National Cancer Institute. Native Americans are often not represented in studies at all Without enough minority participants, it’s virtually impossible to determine the effectiveness and side effects of a particular medication to that group. To compound this, there is no place online for minorities to research drug information specifically targeted for them. There is no online community where users can read and contribute to side effect/drug efficacy reviews by people that look like them. In the episode, we discuss Kwaku’s background, more about what made him interested in this area of medicine, and what he has learned along the way getting these companies off the ground. Now, let’s get to our conversation with Kwaku Owusu. FootNotes Kwaku’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kwaku-owusu/ DrugViu Website https://www.drugviu.com/ TrialViu Website https://www.trialviu.com/