Clinical trials can save more lives, and

faster, with AI
The tech behind ChatGPT could help solve the heartbreaking problem with clinical trials.

Mario Verduzco / Unsplash / Puwasit Inyavileart / Adobe Stock / Freethink

By Kristin Houser
March 9, 2024
Fields
AI
MEDICINE
Share
​ Copy a link to the article entitled Clinical trials can save more lives, and faster,
with AI
​ Share Clinical trials can save more lives, and faster, with AI on Twitter (X)
​ Share Clinical trials can save more lives, and faster, with AI on Facebook

This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to

world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to
your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.

FEATURED VIDEOS
Why 10,000 tiny lenses are the key to our sci-fi future | Hard Reset
00:00
11:08

The FDA approved 55 brand-new drugs in 2023, and thanks to these

approvals, countless people with cancer, Alzheimer’s, ALS, and other
conditions will have a better shot at a longer, healthier life than they
would have just a year prior.

The number of new drugs reaching the market might have been a lot
higher, though, if finding participants for clinical trials wasn’t such a
challenge — but AI might be able to help fix it.

Missed connections
All the lab tests and animal studies in the world can’t tell us for sure
whether a drug candidate is going to work in people — to find that out,
we need to actually test it in people, and that’s what clinical trials are for.

In the current clinical trial process, drugs are tested first in a small
number of people to make sure they’re safe and to determine an ideal
dosage. Depending on how that goes, larger trials will follow, typically
with the drug being tested against a placebo or existing treatment option
to find out efficacy.

The FDA will not approve new drugs that haven’t proven themselves in
clinical trials, but recruiting and retaining enough people to effectively
test drugs has long been a major challenge for developers — an
estimated 90% of clinical trials experience delays due to low enrollment,
and failure to enroll enough participants is the number one reason given
for early trial termination.

“The clinical trial process is impressively broken, obtuse, and confusing.”

 BESS STILLMAN

Surprisingly, the problem goes the other way, too — people with rare
diseases, terminal illnesses, or conditions that aren’t responding to
existing treatments will often seek out clinical trials, only to discover
that finding one they qualify for is a huge challenge.

TOP STORIES

Top Stories
01:12
How one streamer learned to play video games with only
her mind
“Despite the stakes, from the patient’s perspective, the clinical trial
process is impressively broken, obtuse, and confusing,” Bess Stillman,
an ER doctor, writes of her experience trying to find a clinical trial for
her husband, Jake, who is facing an aggressive type of cancer.

“[The process is] one that I gather no one likes,” she continues. “Patients
don’t, their families don’t, hospitals and oncologists who run the clinical
trials don’t, drug companies must not, and the people who die while
waiting to get into a trial probably don’t.”

Two healthcare professionals might use different language to describe the same thing.
Neither issue — drug developers’ trouble finding trial participants, and
patients’ problems finding trials — has a single cause. One hurdle they
share, however, is the fact that current approaches for matching patients
and trials are time consuming and labor intensive — even for medical
professionals.

“Although I’m a doctor,” writes Stillman, “I’ve been stymied by the

clinical trial process.”

Trials have very strict criteria on who can and can’t participate, and
study staff will sometimes start their search for people who qualify by
hunting through the electronic health records (EHRs) of patients at their
study sites.

The challenge with this is that you might be able to filter EHRs to show
you people of a certain age or with a certain condition, but crucial details
on, say, how they responded to a specific treatment might have been
typed into a text box by whoever treated the patient.

Two healthcare professionals might use different language to describe

the same thing, so if that treatment response is key to trial eligibility, the
only way to screen for it might be to have someone who understands
medical lingo manually review EHRs and match them with trial criteria.

Not only is that inefficient, human reviewers might accidentally

overlook qualifying patients — after all, they’re only human.