A team of Ontario researchers is developing PMATCH, an automated system to match precision medicine clinical trials with eligible cancer patients.
Clinical trials can be the best way to test new cancer technologies and treatments, and can give patients access to potentially life-saving innovations.
Yet connecting patients with a trial they’re eligible for can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Clinicians and researchers are tasked with identifying all available trial options and their unique eligibility criteria, and comparing that against patients’ health history and complex medical information derived from various sources, including lab tests and tumours’ genomic profiles.
That process can be inefficient and time-consuming. As a result, only a small fraction of cancer patients participates in clinical trials, and many trials struggle to recruit enough patients to yield meaningful results. And it’s only getting more complicated in the age of precision medicine, where patients often need to have cancers with specific genetic mutations or genetic signatures to be eligible for a trial.
But a group of researchers led Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Dr. Trevor Pugh and Dr. Janet Dancey believe they can limit these missed opportunities and save time and money in the process.
Leveraging funds from Genome Canada and harnessing data from the OICR-supported Ontario-wide Cancer Targeted Nucleic Acid Evaluation (OCTANE) clinical trial, they’ve developed a software platform called PMATCH that uses machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence (AI) – to match patients with precision medicine trials in near real-time. This technology allows PMATCH to compare detailed genomic and health data against eligibility requirements of clinical trial protocols, and even recommend trials for specific patients based on the most up-to-date cancer research data available.
“PMATCH can help drive a new era of precision medicine by automating how patients in Canada are connected to clinical trials, and raising awareness and computability of available trials, so that cancer patients can benefit.” says Pugh, Director of OICR’s Genomics Program, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Professor of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto.
Ultimately, the team wants clinicians to be able to use PMATCH to quickly find trials for their patients, and for researchers to use it to find potential participants for their trials. For patients who don’t match to existing clinical trials, PMATCH will allow clinicians to access cutting-edge candidate biomarkers predictive of therapy response to better guide treatment decisions.
But before it can be rolled out across the country, PMATCH will be tested and refined at participating cancer centres. That work will be supported by the Canadian Cancer Clinical Trials Network (3CTN), a pan-Canadian network with coordinating centre based at OICR that aims to improve the quality of academic cancer clinical trials in Canada. Working with 3CTN, PMATCH researchers will be able to leverage the network’s comprehensive portfolio of adult and pediatric clinical trials, and build on 3CTN’s Canadian Precision Oncology Trial Finder.
“This project lines up perfectly with 3CTN’s priorities to improve how cancer clinical trials are run and improve access to the latest cancer innovations for people across Canada,” says Dancey, who is Scientific Director of 3CTN, Director of the Canadian Clinical Trials Group (CCTG) and Professor of Oncology at Queen’s University.
The PMATCH team just launched a pilot program involving Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, BC Cancer and Kingston Health Sciences. If all goes well, they hope to further refine and scale up PMATCH over the next few years. They would eventually like to see PMATCH used at all major cancer centres in Canada, saying it could help increase the number of cancer patients matched to precision cancer clinical trials in Canada by as much as 50 per cent.
“If we can get as many trials as possible into the system, researchers will be able to recruit much faster and clinical trials will get better,” says Haibe-Kains, who is Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Professor of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. “Then we can also be certain patients with cancer have access to the best possible care.”
