By Clinical Research News Staff

December 23, 2019 | December was full of exciting news in the clinical trial and healthcare community, including partnerships, products, and promotions from Clinerion, Belong.Life, NVIDIA, and more. 

Clinerion and Massive Bio have partnered to improve trial site selection and thereby offer better access for cancer patients to leading-edge clinical trials. Clinerion offers Massive Bio access to oncology patient insights for site outreach and identification of cohorts for trial site selection and patient recruitment. Clinerion’s Patient Network Explorer queries anonymized patient data from its international network of partner hospitals to deliver real-world health data insights useful for Massive Bio’s site outreach programs. Clinerion’s ANID technology meanwhile allows authorized clinical trial staff to re-identify patients for screening and inclusion in trials, speeding up patient recruitment. “With Clinerion’s market leadership outside the US and Massive Bio’s US market leadership in oncology clinical trials, we feel that we form a powerful combination to provide global coverage and serve a global client base which creates significant growth opportunities for both enterprises,” Selin Kurnaz, Co-founder and CEO of Massive Bio, said in a press release. “We are excited for the opportunities in front of us.” “Massive Bio’s specialization in oncology offers a great opportunity for Clinerion to support cancer patients in bringing them access to international clinical research and accelerate the development of next generation medical interventions,” Ian Rentsch, CEO of Clinerion, said in an official statement. “This partnership gives us yet another way to improve patient experience and outcomes.” Press release 

Clinerion also announced it has been certified by EHDEN (European Health Data & Evidence Network) to map health data from various formats to the OMOP common data model. As an OMOP ambassador, Clinerion will support the speeding up of the process to map health data from various formats and institutions to the OMOP common data model in Europe. Clinerion was selected as one of eleven SMEs (Small and medium-sized enterprises) from a pool of twenty-eight eligible applications to the first EHDEN pilot call this year, to be trained and certified, with the objective to speed up the process to map health data from various formats and institutions to the OMOP common data model. EHDEN aims to develop a federated and equitable ecosystem of institutions generating clinical data, with researchers across academia and industry, supported by certified and qualified SMEs, harmonizing clinical data and creating a network technology for real-world research. It will incorporate appropriate policy and regulatory requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ethical research guidelines, via privacy by design in its sociotechnical infrastructure. Press release 

Belong.Life, creator of the "Belong- Beating Cancer Together" mobile app, announced that it has suggested more than 6,000 clinical trial matches to cancer patients using the Belong app. Belong's matching feature uses machine learning and clinical trial-specific NLP algorithms to analyze all available trials around the globe in real time from databases such as the NIH and CTTI. In addition, Belong's clinical trial coordinators apply their expertise to supervise the algorithms and help identify relevant trials. Patients who opt-in to the free and anonymous service are matched within 48 hours, on average. “One of the reasons we were inspired to found Belong was the difficulty in finding relevant clinical trials for our family members,” said Eliran Malki, Co-Founder and CEO of Belong, in a press release. “There is a lot of great research taking place around the world that patients can benefit from, but amidst the difficult cancer treatment, it's easy to miss trials, even if they are happening around the corner from your house. Now patients and doctors running trials know that Belong is the place they can turn to in order to find one other. This important service is just one of the many patient engagement tools we are proud to provide on our platform.” Press release 

NVIDIA recently announced its AI platform for healthcare, Clara, is being adopted by multiple healthcare and genomics companies, including BGI, United Imaging, and Ping An. In a blog post, the company detailed the particulars of each partnership, from BGI’s flow cell technology and acceleration being enhanced by a pair of NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, making BGI’s DNBSEQ-T7 sequencing system the highest throughput genome sequencer to date. United Imaging’s total body PET-CT scanner uses 16 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and eight 56 GB/s InfiniBand network links from Mellanox to process movie-like scans that can acquire up to a terabyte of data. The system is already deployed in the US at the University of California, Davis, where scientists helped design the system. “Further afield, a growing number of smart medical devices are using AI for enhanced signal and image processing, workflow optimizations and data analysis,” Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at NVIDIA, wrote on the company’s blog. “And on the horizon are patient monitors that can sense when a patient is in danger and smart endoscopes that can guide surgeons during surgery. It’s no exaggeration to state that, in the future, every sensor in the hospital will have AI-infused capabilities.” NVIDIA’s recently announced NVIDIA Clara AGX developer kit helps address this trend, Powell writes.. Clara AGX comprises hardware based on NVIDIA Xavier SoCs and Volta Tensor Core GPUs, along with a Clara AGX software development kit, to enable the proliferation of smart medical devices that make healthcare both smarter and more personal. Blog 

Leapcure announced the expansion of its suite of trial services to the medical device industry, helping medical device companies with the successful recruitment, enrollment, and engagement of patients in clinical trials. Leapcure’s protocol-level feasibility service assesses if a clinical trial’s goals are achievable and that trial requirements are designed with patients in mind. This minimizes study burden on patients and helps to determine the availability of study population. Site selection is a critical component for trials, especially in medical device when the trials are inherently more complex. Leapcure incorporates recruitment viability, delivering the best experience for patients and identifying sites that will be effective recruitment partners. The above coupled with Leapcure’s dynamic and adaptive recruitment services when enrollment opens has led to an impressive average refer to enroll ratio of 10:1, five times more efficient than other recruitment offerings. Traditional media buys and standalone social media ads can be as burdensome as 50:1. Adaptive recruitment always for real-time patient feedback that doesn’t pigeon-hole a sponsor into any one recruitment tactic, utilizing multiple communications strategies that absorb patient feedback, maintain trust and inform expectations for study participation. “Using a multi-pronged approach to recruitment, we find the right patients for clinical studies and guide them through the recruitment process so everyone’s expectations are met. This is critical for ensuring a trial meets timelines and stays within budget,” Zach Gobst, CEO of Leapcure, said in a press release. “Ultimately, we make enrolling in a clinical trial easier for every party involved so that research funding is optimized and innovation moves forward.” Press release 

MedAnswers announced that the Patient Matching Platform has officially launched through the company’s free iOS and Android app, FertilityAnswers. The platform matches users who are struggling to conceive with the clinicians, products, and clinical trials based on their unique self-reported health data. “We are tackling a two-sided problem: Users spend countless hours researching from a vast wasteland of misinformation and clinicians are facing increasing costs to acquire a new patient. The health data we collect allows us to make clinically and scientifically validated recommendations our users need. Our democratized pricing model for clinicians and companies ensures we become the lowest cost patient acquisition channel. Clinicians and companies selling fertility focused products have been quick to sign up for the service,” said Alice Crisci, Co-Founder and CEO, in a press release. With FertilityAnswers, users complete a basic health profile and fill out custom surveys. They then have access to over 250 fertility experts across a dozen different disciplines to ask unlimited questions. The Matching Platform is the next step in the fertility care continuum and matches the services most necessary given each person’s unique circumstance. For example, users with a condition called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) do not typically get a Luteinizing hormone (LH) surge each month to predict ovulation. In this instance, the platform would recommend a quantitative ovulation tool, which is already clinically proven to work for those with PCOS. Press release