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Alnylam’s Commitment to Health Literacy for All
October 20, 2025
As a patient-centric organization, Alnylam is fully committed to promoting the principles of health literacy as an integral part of our innovation and culture.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health literacy as the ability to obtain, read, understand, and use healthcare information. It plays a vital role in our capacity to navigate complex medical information and the healthcare system with confidence. When we understand medical instructions, prescriptions, nutrition labels, and health education materials, we are better equipped to take charge of our own health.
Strong health literacy not only supports better health outcomes and increases the use of preventive care but also helps reduce healthcare costs and fosters clearer communication with healthcare providers.
Research has shown that people who have access to clear health information have fewer unnecessary emergency room visits, fewer preventable hospital stays, and a reduction in medication errors. Recognizing its importance and taking deliberate steps to enhance it, enables us to make informed choices and pursue healthier, more fulfilling lives.
Health Literacy and Health Equity
Health equity is defined by the WHO as the ability for all individuals to attain their full potential for health and well-being. The fair and just distribution of health resources, opportunities, and outcomes, ensures that everyone has an equal chance to achieve their best possible health. Studies have shown that poverty, structural racism, discrimination, and other social determinants of health have a greater impact on population health than factors like biology, behavior and health care. Limited health literacy can hinder access to care and reinforce existing health inequities, particularly those linked to race and ethnicity, age, education, and socioeconomic status.
The Role of Organizations in Facilitating Health Literacy
Health literacy is a two-way street. The burden of limited health literacy should not lie solely on the individual. How organizations empower people to obtain, read, and understand information has a significant role to play in advancing health equity. Principles of health equity at Alnylam include:
- Strategy: Integrating health equity considerations throughout our business operations
- Science: Advancing new medicines and innovations that increase accessibility and efficacy
- Advocacy: Using our leadership platform to raise awareness and amplify patient voices
- Collaboration: Bringing together payers, providers, governments, regulators, patient advocacy organizations, distribution partners, and other global stakeholders to develop systemic solutions that remove barriers to care
- Empathy: Ensuring our culture and employees are inclusive and responsive to the needs of patients
- Innovation: Empowering innovators and social sector organizations to address the specific needs of targeted populations
Creating Plain Language Summaries of our Clinical Trials
Following the principles outlined in clinical trial regulation in the European Union, we create plain language summaries of our trial results for all studies regardless of their location. This ensures that information on our trials is available in brief, clear, nontechnical language. We actively engage with patients throughout the summary process to gather valuable feedback and make sure our language choices are meeting patient needs. These summaries are translated in all applicable languages and hosted on our clinical trials website, along with our other clinical trial information.
In addition to creating summaries of the results, we also create summaries of select protocols that provide an overview of a trial’s design and goals. Together, these materials provide an accessible description of how our studies are run and their outcomes.
Access to Alnylam Trial Information
We carefully designed Alnylam’s Clinical Trials website to provide patients, healthcare providers, caregivers, and the public with a user-friendly, and mobile-optimized environment to explore our trials, find trial locations, and understand the recruiting status of each trial.
Currently available in 35 languages, it also includes helpful information on what a clinical trial is, what it is like to participate in a trial, and the importance of diversity in our trials.
The site also conforms to global web accessibility standards and offers users a full range of adjustments including (but not limited to) vision impaired, seizure safe and cognitive disability profiles
Alnylam's Clinical Trials WebsiteDiversity in Clinical Trials
Alnylam is taking tangible steps in the design and management of our clinical trials to lower barriers to participation and ensure more diverse representation. Some examples include:
- Engaging underserved communities directly to educate about clinical trials, demonstrate transparency, and build trust
- Engaging healthcare providers that serve underserved communities
- Structuring trial protocols to maximize participation of under-represented populations
- Enrolling a wide range of participants in our clinical trials with the goal of ensuring widespread efficacy
- Working with our partners and experts in the field to identify investigators and sites in communities around the world serving geographically, racially, and ethnically diverse populations
- Ensuring that clinical trials-related communications and materials reflect the wide range of participants globally, are culturally appropriate, and accessible
Additional Efforts to Address Health Equity
The passion to improve human health is the driver of Alnylam’s community impact work. Our signature social impact program, Alnylam Challengers, unites bold leaders and organizations working to improve health and well-being for people in underserved communities by expanding access to personalized care and support.
Alnylam Challengers include community health workers, patient navigators, nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, and volunteers who are activating innovative approaches to deliver culturally competent care and connect people to much needed community and health-related resources. Read more about Alnylam Challengers here.
Staying Connected to Our Patients
By listening to the patients we aim to serve throughout their treatment journey and their communities, we further inform and improve our efforts to effectively communicate health information.
Alnylam Assist is our U.S. patient support program and offers personalized services and resources throughout a patient’s treatment with an Alnylam product. Eligible patients can call Alnylam Assist or visit the website to receive support with insurance coverage, financial assistance, and educational materials that are disease-specific and easy to understand.
Members of the Alnylam Assist TeamAlnylam Celebrates Health Literacy Month
We celebrate Health Literacy Month each October as an opportunity to shine a light on these initiatives and assess our progress in supporting the connection between understandable health information and the ability to make informed health choices. We recognize our organizational responsibility to continually evolve our approach to sustainable inclusion of all communities. Effectively addressing health literacy starts as we develop new products and continues throughout the product life cycle.
Further examples of our continued work in health literacy include:
- Work with advocacy groups to better understand patient community needs
- Providing education by publishing materials with patient-friendly language about the diseases that we serve, such as the following for the amyloidosis community:
- Reducing barriers to genetic testing and counseling to help people make more informed decisions about their health through the Alnylam Act® program
- Utilizing plain language and graphics in digital and online resources
- Creating product labels that are clear and easy to understand
- Improving health literacy within clinical trials by evaluating our patient facing materials and soliciting feedback from the communities we serve
- Continually expanding our plain language glossary of medical/scientific terms
- Collaborating with external partners for best practices
- Continually support research on health literacy
Fostering principles of health literacy reflects our culture and helps us deliver on what matters most: meaningful patient impact. As Alnylam looks ahead, we are committed to transparency and continuing to build strong relationships with the patient communities we serve.
