Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, stopped by a health care conference held at Snapdragon Stadium Friday to promote a major government initiative aimed at spurring medical innovation, especially around equitable care for Latinos.
In collaboration with San Diego State University, Becerra and members of his team highlighted the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, an independent federal agency created in 2022. The agency promotes “high-impact biomedical and health research that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity,” according to its website.
Many of the projects already on the organization’s agenda are about seeking breakthroughs, from engineering more effective human immune cells to inventing precision surgical techniques.
But Becerra’s focus as he toured California this week was on reaching out, often in Spanish, on ways that innovative ideas, and especially access to research, can be pushed more deeply into diverse neighborhoods.
Asked to respond to those who question any and all efforts that focus on better serving migrant populations, the secretary called criticisms myopic.
“We have to make sure that we don’t treat health care like some luxury item that only certain people will get,” Becerra said. “At the end of the day, we all have to lift this country, lift our economy, (and) we do it better when we’re all healthy.”
Increasing participation in clinical trials is a focus.
While life-saving new drugs and medical procedures are often available to those who enroll in clinical trials years before they become the nationwide standard of care, researchers have found that Latinos and others in underserved communities participate at rates that are lower than their overall proportion of the population.
One of the advanced projects agency’s first initiatives, explained the organization’s director, Renee Wegrzyn, is an initiative that attempts to increase trial access by working to create more locations where residents can enroll and get accurate information on how they might benefit from participating in research.
“The goal is to bring 90 percent of America within 30 minutes of clinical trials, and this is implicitly inclusive of black and brown communities everywhere,” Wegrzyn said.
The current mode of operation, she noted, is for trial infrastructure to last only as long as is absolutely necessary to treat a particular drug, medical device or new procedure.
“Once that trial is finished, the whole infrastructure shuts down, but we’re going to flip the script and create a leave-behind infrastructure that can keep growing and build trust with communities,” Wegrzyn said.
She added that a big piece of the agency’s approach will be making sure that trials offered by this new network include participants representing all demographic groups known to be affected by any given disease being targeted by a new therapy.
The first initiative likely to generate new trials is the Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis, which is currently seeking proposals for injectable drugs that could help ease the pain felt by millions of Americans due to deteriorated joints.
San Diego County’s most-recent health care equity change involves the closure of maternity services at Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista. Scripps Health has indicated that it needs to use the square footage currently occupied by deliveries to house patients with severe symptoms who require observation.
Asked whether any federal work might trickle down to affect the situation in South Bay, Becerra kept his comments general.
“We’re doing whatever we can, at the federal level, to keep hospitals from closing,” Becerra said. “Where we see the worst case of hospital closures is in rural communities, and we’re doing what we can, with the support of Congress, to try to support many of those facilities that have a very difficult time keeping their doors open.”
Rep. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, added that he is very concerned to about the plans to move the Mercy Chula Vista maternity ward north to Mercy San Diego in Hillcrest.
“I mean, you can’t tell me, with a whole lot of Hispanic (and) Latinos, are not having a lot of kids,” Vargas said. “I mean, we are; we’re a growing community.”
