After an impassioned plea from a patient advocate at BioNJ’s annual dinner and innovation celebration in February, the trade organization began pulling together an initiative to improve access to clinical trials for its members’ employees.
“Time Off for Clinical Trials," launched on Nov. 20, sees six of BioNJ’s biggest members—Amicus Therapeutics, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genmab, PsychoGenics, PTC Therapeutics and Sanofi—commit to giving their employees paid time off to take part in clinical trials.
The companies will implement the policy within and alongside their existing structures for time off, according to a Nov. 20 release shared with Fierce Biotech.
"Clinical trials saved my life, yet we still grapple with major barriers to health equity in these studies,” Lisa Salberg, patient advocate and founder and CEO of the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association, said in the release. “We must make it easier for people to participate—especially for hourly workers and underrepresented populations.”
It was Salberg who stood in front of New Jersey’s biopharma industry leaders in February and challenged them to change their time off policies to include clinical trial participation.
Emer Leahy, Ph.D., the new chair of BioNJ and president and CEO of PsychoGenics, was moved by Salberg’s speech and quickly moved to make the idea a reality, BioNJ president and CEO Debbie Hart told Fierce in an interview.
BioNJ is in talks with other members in the hope that they’ll also take up the pledge, Hart added, and the organization also plans to share news of the program with life science trade organizations in other states.
On Nov. 8, the Wage and Hour Division of the federal Department of Labor published an advisory opinion (PDF) stating that participation in clinical trials is a valid reason to take unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. This applies even if the treatment is new, experimental, a placebo or not proven to meet efficacy criteria, the agency said.
BioNJ is the New Jersey affiliate of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. The group represents more than 400 life sciences organizations across the Garden State, which is home to many companies and employees in the biopharma industry.
In 2023, “more than 50% of all novel drug approvals came from companies with a footprint in New Jersey,” Hart said.
Hart sees the “Time Off” initiative as a component of BioNJ’s larger mission to advance health equity. The trade org recently partnered with Medidata for a white paper comparing the racial and ethnic diversity of clinical trial participants in New Jersey to the nearby states of Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York.
The study found that despite having a higher incidence of lung cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, Black patients with the diseases were underrepresented in clinical trials across all five states.