Health inequalities research involving the pharmaceutical industry globally: a scoping review

To assess health inequalities research involving the pharmaceutical industry and to highlight key themes and potential research gaps.

Briefly, a literature search of article titles on the Embase and MEDLINE databases was performed to identify relevant peer-reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2023. A review of gray literature sources and pharmaceutical company global websites was performed in parallel. Peer-reviewed literature and gray literature were excluded during pre-screening based on pre-defined eligibility criteria. Peer-reviewed publications that met the eligibility criteria underwent double-blind title and abstract screening to determine relevance to health inequalities research; gray literature was screened by one reviewer. All publications included after title and abstract screening underwent full-text review.

The peer-reviewed literature search yielded 1,377 initial results, of which 18 publications were included for data extraction; the gray literature search yielded 10 articles. Peer-reviewed publications involving the pharmaceutical industry increased over the past 5 years. North America was included as the region of research focus or study population in 61.1% (11/18) of the peer-reviewed publications. Health inequalities across race/ethnicity (66.7% [12/18]), sex/gender (44.4% [8/18]) and socioeconomic status (27.8% [5/18]) featured in the identified publications. Across the medicines and vaccines development and launch process, 71.4% (5/7) of the publications focused on increasing clinical trial participant diversity.

The pharmaceutical industry has contributed to the discussion on health inequalities, particularly over the past 5 years. However, industry can better take the wider determinants of health into consideration when designing strategies of evidence generation across the medicines development pathway.