Overcoming Access Barriers to Cancer Clinical Trials via an Innovative Platform for Matching Patients to Trials and Resources

Abstract public domain (NIH RePORTER)

Project Summary More than 2M Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in 2025. Scientific advances to combat this disease are dependent on a crucially important step: participation in clinical trials to test new therapies. But trial enrollment isn’t keeping up with the pace of scientific discovery, as 40% of trials fail to meet enrollment targets and 10% are canceled outright due to lack of participation. Both patients and physicians are interested in clinical trials: 75% of patients with cancer want to know about clinical trial options, and 70% of healthcare providers are interested in referring patients to a trial. Yet just ~8% of patients with cancer ultimately enroll in clinical trials. The gap between interest and access is driven, in part, by a lack of information. Current solutions do not provide patients and doctors with quick access to find and share easy-to-understand information about all suitable clinical trials. These solutions are often filled with overly technical medical jargon, are difficult to navigate, or are limited to information for trials in a single hospital system. And if a well-matched trial is found, logistical and financial (“structural”) limitations can make participation too difficult, particularly for patients seen in community hospitals. The resulting low participation rates harm everyone involved: biopharma sponsors can’t quickly advance scientific discovery, physicians rely solely on standard of care therapies, and most importantly, patients are never given the choice to consider advanced therapies. In this Phase I SBIR proposal, TriCan Health will build an innovative platform using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform our preliminary patient-facing search capability to fundamentally change the way patients and their doctors work together to find best-match clinical trial options. The TriCan platform takes a novel approach by addressing in parallel three key barriers to participation: patient awareness, physician ease of use, and structural limitations. The first indication will be pancreatic cancer, due to its low 5-year survival rate. Aim #1 will leverage AI to synthesize and categorize complex trial eligibility criteria, making it easier for patients and their doctors to accurately identify best-match trials. Aim #2 will enable physicians to rapidly screen those eligibility criteria, find appropriate trials and discuss options with their patients. Aim #3 will deliver targeted patient resources to overcome structural barriers by matching patients to more than 300 Resource Snapshots. This Phase I proposal will be successful if categorization accuracy ≥ 80%; qualitative feedback measures of usability, relevance, and efficiency improve with each iteration; and quantitative metrics (adoption, utility, and retention) equal or exceed healthcare industry median levels. Said another way, these measures will indicate if patients and doctors use it, get value from it, and come back to use it again. In Phase II, the platform will add five cancer indications, expand resource coverage, and include language translations. By improving awareness of clinical trial options, facilitating shared patient-physician decision-making, and overcoming barriers to enrollment, this AI-enhanced platform will engage more patients in clinical trials, thereby accelerating development of new cancer therapies and improving patient outcomes.

Public health relevance public domain (NIH RePORTER)

Project Narrative Millions of patients with cancer never have the opportunity to consider participating in a clinical trial, because several barriers stand in the way, especially 1) patient awareness of available options, 2) easy-to-use trial search capabilities for physicians, and 3) logistical and financial barriers. TriCan Health is building an innovative platform to empower and inform patients about their treatment options, to make it easy for their doctors to rapidly screen for appropriate trials, and to deliver personalized resources to help patients overcome financial and logistical barriers to trial participation. TriCan’s platform has the potential to increase patient engagement and enrollment in clinical trials, which in turn would accelerate the discovery and development of advanced treatment options for the more than 2 million people in the US diagnosed with cancer every year.