Participants in Science app
What if you set up a clinical trial and nobody signed up? That’s an all-too-common problem for many researchers; only 3 percent of patients with cancer, for instance, sign up for a clinical trial and up to 60 percent of oncology trials enroll no more than one patient, according to a 2015 Forbes article.
Two new methods for recruiting patients, introduced this week, tap the power of Big Data and technology to streamline the process of matching patients with clinical trials.
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One, a smartphone app, was developed by Dr. Peter Elkin, a biomedical informatics professor at the University at Buffalo. He unveiled the app Thursday at the Information Technology in Academic Medicine conference in Toronto. He developed the app, a sort of Tinder for clinical trial enrollment, so that patients could quickly find clinical trials in their geographic area matching their health interests and needs.
“One of the biggest problems in science today is the slow speed at which we translate basic science into new research,” Elkin said, noting that it typically takes 17 years for a scientific advancement to wend its way from the laboratory to clinical practice.
“About two-thirds of clinical trials never reach full recruitment, and that is a serious barrier to get treatments that work to people who need those treatments. We thought by contacting potential participants directly and using a smartphone app to enroll in trials might help [clinical trials] to recruit more quickly.”
The app, called Participants in Science, will be available by the end of summer through iTunes and GooglePlay, Elkin said. Once patients download the app, they can do a free word search to find clinical trials in their area focused on their specific health condition.
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Patients already can use websites such as clinicaltrials.gov and researchmatch.org to find clinical trials by health condition and location. But the smartphone app offers more detailed information, Elkin said, such as exactly how far the trial is located from the patient’s home, the time commitment required and whether the patient will be paid for participating.
In the weeks leading up to Participants in Science’s commercial availability, Elkin is getting the word out to researchers. Principal investigators interested in recruiting patients using the app will be able to register on a website that will go live this summer, he said. Elkin added that he is also designing a similar app for physicians who are looking for clinical trials for their patients.
The other new approach to matching patient with clinical trials was developed by Quintiles, a company that provides biopharmaceutical clinical development services. On Wednesday, Quintiles launched its oncology Precision Enrollment model, in which electronic health records are scoured to find patients who are the perfect match for cancer clinical trials. Quintiles first developed a network of 80 cancer research sites, said Jeanne Hecht, the company’s senior vice president and global head of site and patient networks.
“We do an assessment visit upfront that allows us to accelerate the start-up of that site [in] 21 days,” Hecht said. “We will identify patients at those particular sites and will only open sites when a patient meets inclusion/exclusion criteria. We will not open sites before patients exist, allowing us and the clinical site to save on costs.”
Developing the model took much planning and negotiating, Hecht said, since the model involves mining EHR data. All of the patient information culled from the EHRs is de-identified until appropriate patients are found, she said.
Since 11 percent of clinical trial sites never enroll a patient, postponing the trial until at least one suitable patient has been found will provide significant cost and time savings to time-pressed clinicians, she noted.
“Physicians run very busy practices,” Hecht said. “We are helping to reduce the administrative burden and that is a benefit to our customers.”
Image: University of Buffalo