For Del Smith, the effort to increase minority participation in clinical drug trials is personal. His mother, a healthcare worker, passed away from tuberculosis.

“They gave her drug after drug, after drug, trying to figure out which one was actually going to save her life,” Smith said. “And unfortunately, it wasn’t successful.”

He believes now that if drug makers could have created a treatment using clinical trials with more racially diverse participants, a drug regimen might have been developed that better matched her genetic profile and saved her life.

“It could have changed the outcome. Don’t know,” he continued, “but that was the information that we didn’t have.”