With growing concern about a shortfall of patients to participate in clinical trials - especially adult cancer patients, minorities and adolescents - some new programs are trying to match patients to trials and educate patients and their physicians about the benefits of medical research, The Wall Street Journal writes.

Large medical centers are developing their own web sites to inform and recruit trial patients locally. And nonprofit health organizations are reaching out to community groups to educate residents about clinical trials and help them navigate issues such as getting insurers to pay the costs of participation, the paper continues.

There are also efforts to get more adolescents into trials. More than 60 percent of pediatric cancer patients under 15 participate, but only 10 percent of those age 15 to 19 do so. ImTooYoungForThis.org is a support network for young cancer patients that also contains information about participation and links to EmergingMed, a for-profit service that connects patients to trials.

“We need to explain to the American public that the drugs we are benefiting from today did not come out of thin air,” Armin Weinberg, director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Research Center, tells the Journal.

According to the nonprofit Coalition of Cancer Cooperative Groups, only 3 percent of US adults with cancer participate in clinical trials, which isn’t enough to gauge effectiveness. Nearly 200,000 newly diagnosed patients may be eligible each year to participate in a cancer treatment trial but only 50,000 patients do so, the group says, according to the Journal.

Fear is one factor, but studies show that the more likely culprit is ignorance: In one survey by Harris Interactive, 85 percent of cancer patients were either unaware or unsure at the time of their diagnosis that participation in clinical trials was an option. Of those, 75 percent said they would have been willing to enroll had they known it was possible, the Journal writes.