PROVIDENCE — About a month after CVS Health announced it was shutting down its clinical trials unit, rival drugstore chain Walgreens is further expanding its own, partnering with a biotech startup to “increase diversity in research focused on the early detection of cancer.”
Walgreens inked a deal with Freenome Holdings Inc., which is based in San Francisco, for its study of blood-based tests for early cancer detection. The drugstore chain and Freenome said their “collaboration aligns” with President Biden’s “national cancer plan” and its goals of “detecting cancer early and eliminating inequities.”
CVS’s decision to shut down its clinical trials could suggest that retail pharmacies face challenges in the space, but Walgreens executives say they’re taking advantage of the open field.
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“We’ve been getting a number of calls from industry partners looking to transition their studies from CVS over to us,” Walgreens chief clinical trials officer Ramita Tandon told Bloomberg.
The Illinois-based company has declined to provide financial results of the unit.
Walgreens started its clinical trial division a year ago, and has already announced half a dozen deals, including its partnership with Prothena to help recruit patients for the biotech company’s experimental treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
CVS, which is headquartered in Woonsocket, was the first retail chain to move into the clinical trials space in 2021, coming right after executives had worked with the pharmaceutical industry to facilitate clinical trials for investigational COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. The company enrolled more than 300,000 volunteers and connected them to studies close to where they lived.
While that plan was closely followed and pharmacy chains Walgreens and Walmart launched their own health research institutes in 2022, CVS announced last month that it would phase out the unit. The company will fully exit clinical trials by the end of next year.
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The business “no longer aligned with our long-term strategic priorities,” a CVS spokesperson previously said.
Like CVS, Walgreens has been working to expand its health care offerings and move into patient care. The company has added primary care centers to numerous locations in the United States, and partnered with health insurers. In 2022, the company bought Summit Health-CityMD, a specialty and urgent care provider, for $8.9 billion.
Clinical trials have historically struggled to reach volunteers of varied ages, races, and ethnicities. In general, only 4 percent of the US population participates in clinical trials, and about 30 percent of those who enroll end up dropping out.
One of the reasons Walgreens executives say they launched this unit was to combat the lack of diversity among participants by developing a model to recruit from the company’s pharmacy patients and leverage its nearly 9,000 retail locations across the country.
The federal government has also helped boost the demand for clinical trial recruitment. In last year’s omnibus spending bill, legislation requires manufacturers to have a clear strategy for ensuring diverse patient populations in drug development planning and trial efforts.
“We are full steam ahead as we continue to support many of our manufacturers that have come into the ecosystem since June [2022]” when the company launched its clinical trials segment, Walgreens’ chief clinical trials officer told Yahoo Finance in an interview in May. “We’re very focused on what we’re doing at Walgreens because it’s part of the broader health care mission and journey that we’re on.”
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Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.