Promoting Community Engagement for Clinical Trials in Asia

Clinical trials are crucial for advancing medical knowledge and improving public health outcomes. However, clinical trials in Asia encounter unique challenges, such as diverse cultural contexts, varying levels of health literacy, and historical controversies in medical research. Community engagement has been suboptimal in Asia, leading to low participation rates. This threatens the scientific validity of clinical trials and increases costs.

Effective community engagement is vital for overcoming challenges and improving recruitment, particularly in areas with health disparities and limited healthcare access. By building trust and collaboration between researchers and communities, trials can achieve their goals and lead to meaningful health improvements. Successful engagement models can inform policy changes and best practices, contributing to global health equity.

In this project, we aim to develop and evaluate community engagement strategies to enhance public support for clinical trials, establish regional hubs for ongoing engagement, and create scalable frameworks and tools. Implemented in three phases over three years, it will assess success through a concurrent Phase II trial enrolment, retention, and community surveys, with results shared through scientific and regional channels.

Regional Hub Sites

Three regional hubs have been established in Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand. These locations were chosen for their diverse cultural contexts, existing capacity, and involvement in the Phase II clinical trial. This ensures engagement efforts directly support trial recruitment and retention.

Each hub will form a Community Advisory Group comprising of community members, patient advocates, healthcare professionals, trial investigators, ethics board members and policymakers. Working alongside the site’s Principal Investigator, the group will design and implement tailored activities to strengthen community engagement and improve trial enrolment and retention. The Singapore Core Team will coordination across all three hubs, provide training to enhance engagement capacity, and supply resources to ensure consistency and sustainability across the region.