Cancer informatics and digital pathology provider Inspirata announced that King’s Health Partners ECMC and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust will pilot its Trial Navigator™ software as part of an evaluation the organizations are conducting into how artificial intelligence-based automation can improve the identification and efficiency of matching patients with cancer to early phase clinical trials.

Delays in candidate identification and the absence of real-time visibility of open studies introduces a risk that patients miss out on trials for which they could have ultimately proved eligible. By applying oncology-specific natural language processing (NLP) to interrogate both the patient’s individual medical reports and potential trial eligibility criteria, this project will explore the extent to which Trial Navigator can help to improve bottlenecks in both identifying and matching patients to relevant clinical trials.

“At the Cancer Centre sometimes we offer patients the opportunity to enrol on trials of new cancer drugs when conventional treatments have been unsuccessful. AI technology offers the potential to better match our patients to available trials, but we need to evaluate them first to prove that they can deliver on their promise,” says Danny Ruta, Clinical Artificial Intelligence Lead, Guy’s and St

While building on an underlying oncology NLP engine that has already been successfully deployed at over 400+ hospitals and cancer centres worldwide, Trial Navigator has been purposely designed to improve clinical trial matching by supporting both the clinician at the point of care, and trial coordinators with patient identification. Trial Navigator can also be deployed to perform instantaneous lookups against any relevant trial database.

Scientists are aiming to support the project that seeks to aid clinicians in the complex and time-consuming task of matching patients to suitable trials.