Race Excluded as White House Rolls Out Climate Justice Screening Tool

The Biden administration has released a screening tool to help identify disadvantaged communities long plagued by environmental hazards, but it won’t include race as a factor in deciding where to devote resources.

Administration officials told reporters Friday that excluding race will make projects less likely to draw legal challenges and will be easier to defend, even as they acknowledged that race has been a major factor in terms of who experiences environmental injustice.

The decision was harshly challenged by members of the environmental justice community.

“It’s a major disappointment and it’s a major flaw in trying to identify those communities that have been hit hardest by pollution,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

President Joe Biden has made combating climate change a priority of his administration and pledged in a sweeping executive order to “deliver environmental justice in communities all across America.” The order, signed his first week in office, sets a goal that the 40% of overall benefits from climate and environment investments would go to disadvantaged communities. The tool is a key component for carrying out that so-called Justice40 Initiative.

Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, said the tool will help direct federal investments in climate, clean energy and environmental improvements to communities “that have been left out and left behind for far too long.”

Catherine Coleman Flowers, a member of the advisory council who served on a working group that gave the Biden administration recommendations for the tool, said she agrees with the move to exclude race as an indicator.

She said that this tool is a good start that hopefully will improve with time and that it’s better than creating a tool that includes race as a factor and then gets struck down by the Supreme Court. She said, “race is a factor, but race isn’t the only factor.”

“Being marginalized in other ways is a factor,” she said.

The screening tool uses 21 factors, including air pollution, health outcomes and economic status, to identify communities that are most vulnerable to environmental and economic injustice.

But the omission of race as a factor goes against a deep body of scientific research showing that race is the greatest determinant of who experiences environmental harm, environmental justice experts pointed out.

“This was a political decision,” said Sacoby Wilson, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. “This was not a scientific decision or a data-driven decision.” Wilson has studied the distribution of environmental pollutants and helped develop mapping tools like the one the Council on Environmental Quality released Friday.

This isn’t the first such tool to exist in the United States, or even in the federal government. California, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey have had tools like this for years. And the Environmental Protection Agency has a similar tool, EJ Screen. Many of those screening tools include some information about the racial makeup of communities along with environmental and health data.

The public has 60 days to use the tool and provide feedback on it. The Council on Environmental Quality also announced Friday that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are working on launching a study of existing tools.

Researchers design a drug screening technique for brain metastasis

A quarter of people with cancer are at risk of brain metastases, and finding treatments remains a challenge. Now, a Spanish scientific team has designed a platform capable of testing drugs on the patient’s own tumor tissue and identifying biomarkers of poor prognosis.

Magnetic resonance image of metastases in the cerebellum in a patient with a tumor of unknown origin. Photo: Ramón y Cajal Hospital.

Cancer is not just a tumor, but the tumor and its context and this new system, called METPlatform, allows research with patient samples in a real context, in which metastatic cells grow in the tumor microenvironment that surrounds them, in this case brain metastasis.

Its managers are scientists from the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) and the results of the validation of this technique and its first experiments -in which inhibitors have been identified that could be useful in the future to treat brain metastasis- are published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.

Between 10 and 30% of cancer patients develop brain metastases, mainly from breast, lung and skin tumors.

The fact that there are no specific curative strategies against this type of metastasis makes this disease a serious and growing public health problem, points out the CNIO, which recalls that one of the great limitations for treatment is that these patients have traditionally been excluded from clinical trials.

The objective, therefore, in addition to trying to understand why some tumor cells manage to overcome the strong defensive barriers of the brain, is to explore new therapeutic targets and biomarkers that identify the most aggressive brain metastases.

The platform from which the first results are now presented generates a new way of screening drugs and has as a novelty the use of the patients’ own tumor tissue, Manuel Valiente, head of the CNIO Brain Metastasis Group, explains to Efe.

The strategy is based on the so-called organotypic cultures, whose ultimate goal is the “ex vivo” use of tissues compatible with different experiments. In this work, Valiente and his team have shown that they can also be used directly with patient samples.

Once the samples of fresh or “living” brain tissue affected by metastases are received from the hospitals, they are processed using a simple methodology that allows them to be cultured in the laboratory for a few days.

The METPlatform screening technique is applied to these cultures, where the behavior of hundreds of compounds is analyzed simultaneously.

“The advantage is that for the first time we can use drug batteries to ask if they work by eliminating the metastasis that grows in the organ in which it develops in real life.”

This is important, adds Valiente, because “we know that metastasis needs cancer cells but also interaction with the environment” to progress.

This screening system is “infinitely superior to others”, since it is “very simple and easy to implement in the laboratory, it does not require sophisticated technology, it is much cheaper and faster”: results can be obtained in 7 days, compared to the months needed to obtain them in mice.

The tool favors the reduction of the use of experimental animals but does not replace them; There must always be a passage through animals, for example, to check the toxicity of the molecules.

In the first experiments with this technique, the team screened a library of 114 compounds already approved or in clinical trials; Among the drugs identified are HSP90 inhibitors, which have already been tested for different tumors, although never in brain metastases.

This study suggests that these inhibitors could be useful since their target, HSP90, is increased in brain metastasis. The use of the HSP90 inhibitor in animal models and in organotypic cultures of brain metastases obtained from 19 patients with different cancers showed potent anti-tumor activity.

However, Valiente is cautious, since these molecules have shown side effects and toxicities in clinical trials of cancer patients, and anticipates that a safe therapeutic window will have to be found or their use in combination with others will have to be explored.

Another objective of this platform is to search for biomarkers to identify those patients with a worse prognosis, for which the team found a molecular signature of four genes related to HSP90.

“We speculate that this signature of poor prognosis can identify those patients with greater sensitivity to the HSP90 inhibitor,” says the researcher: if validated, this could be decisive for better clinical management of brain metastasis.

The researchers now trust that METPlatform can position itself as an “avatar” of the patients themselves, that is, incorporate it into clinical trials to test the drug to be received on the patient’s own biopsy to find out if it works as soon as possible: in a proof of concept they saw that this technique is capable of predicting in almost 90% which patient would respond and which would not.

This research involved different hospitals that, through the National Brain Metastasis Network (Renacer), supplied living tissue from patients: 12 de Octubre and La Princesa University Hospitals (both in Madrid), Álvaro Cunqueiro Hospital (Vigo Hospital Complex ), Burgos University Hospital, Albacete University Hospital Complex and Research Unit and Bellvitge University Hospital.