On September 13, the White House Cancer Moonshot program announced its support for and commitment to several new projects to "end cancer as we know it," including a new initiative led by TOUCH, the Black Breast Cancer Alliance, to bolster Black women’s breast cancer clinical trial participation by 2025 — with the goal of reaching 350,000 Black women and motivating 25,000 into trial portals.
The White House also announced a connected program, TOUCH Care, the first program to provide a nurse navigator service to assist Black breast cancer patients in clinical trials. This will include developing culturally-agile recruiting materials, training trial staff, and coaching patients. TOUCH Care is being led by TOUCH co-founder and Duke Cancer Institute patient navigator and patient navigation manager Valarie Worthy, MSN, RN, and piloted with Genentech, which will add five breast cancer clinical trials annually.
Worthy, a two-decade-plus breast cancer survivor, has been a nurse for more than 38 years and worked at Duke for the past 19 years. Her hometown is Ahoskie, in northeastern North Carolina.
