Deep 6 AI | Top eClinical Trial Management Solutions Company 2022
Pharma Tech Outlook

Pharma Tech Outlook

Deep 6 AI
Advancing Clinical Trial Patient Matching with AI

Deep 6 AI: Advancing Clinical Trial Patient Matching with AI

Jason Attanucci, VP, Life Sciences, Deep 6 AIJason Attanucci, VP, Life Sciences
The long, expensive drug discovery and development process is inundated with challenges among which patient recruitment into clinical trials is near the top of the list. Traditionally, this process involves pharmaceutical companies, CROs, and biotech firms, engaging with sites that spend months sifting through a myriad of patient health information—spread across electronic medical records (EMRs), physician notes, pathology reports, and other forms of documentation— to identify qualified patients for a given trial. Not only is the entire approach prolonged, costly, and inefficient but often causes major delays in trial completion. Add to this the complexity brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic; social distancing protocols, concern over patient safety, and other factors have thrown a wrench into the conventional process and led to fewer patient visits to the trial sites. Consequently, organizations are turning to less conventional methods such as decentralized or virtual clinical trials (VCTs) to deal with the current situation. However, since VCTs are a relatively new way of conducting clinical research, the process of enrolling and recruiting patients come with their own set of limitations.

Against this challenging backdrop, there is one company that is now changing the status quo of clinical trials and disrupting the clinical trial enrollment process by transforming the way researchers identify eligible patients. Using AI and NLP to mine structured and unstructured patient data, Deep 6 AI, a Pasadena, CA-based software firm, makes it easier for researchers to find the right cohort of patients to work with. Deep 6 AI’s software extracts tens of thousands of new clinical data points from medical records—including, symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, genomics, and lifestyle data—and turns them into unified patient graphs that contain all of the information needed to be matched to complex clinical trial criteria. Jason Attanucci, Deep 6 AI’s VP, Life Sciences, says, “We are precision matching patients to trials and trials to patients. Through our patient-centric approach, we are speeding up recruitment exponentially with the end goal of getting cures to the people who need them much more quickly.”

While the move from paper to electronic medical records has improved the recruitment and retention process, most patient data in the physician notes and pathology, genomics, and medical imaging reports remain unstructured. The traditionally available software falls short in understanding and analyzing this data requiring a manual process to mine it. What Deep 6 AI does is take the standard EMR data, comprising necessary physician, nurse, and pathologist notes, general lab reports, and genomics reports and map them together using its proprietary and award-winning NLP and AI algorithms to create a multidimensional clinical profile.

Researchers, analysts, and doctors can use the multidimensional profiles to find and compare patients, cohorts, and populations at machine speed using the Deep 6 trial recommender tool. “We are building an ecosystem that brings together all parties involved, allowing the sponsors to effectively select sites based on patient population, allowing the sites to near instantaneously identify a listing of matched patients, allowing the site to focus on outreach and recruitment, and finally and most importantly, the patient allowing the providers and eventually the patient themselves to identify studies that are precision matched to the patient’s current health situation. This will fundamentally change the way patients are found for trials,” explains Attanucci. All a physician needs to do is enter a patient’s medical record number, and the trial recommender immediately matches potential trials or potential therapies to that patients profile in a matter of minutes.

Deep 6 AI’s platform also allows trial sponsors and Investigators to know in advance where to find qualified patients before they invest in activating trial sites. Deep 6 AI is currently working with 15 health systems, and these systems can run queries against the sites, but the queries stay behind a firewall on the site level. Deep 6 AI is planning on rolling out its software through an EMR integration directly into the patients’ hands, allowing them to access the trial recommender via their providers patient portal. “For instance, if a patient is diagnosed with a disease and wants to be part of a trial, they can log into their patient portal and through medical record number into the trial recommender. Deep 6 AI’s technology will map the patient’s profile based on their medical records and then match them to potential trials available,” informs Attanucci. This eliminates the traditional process of patients having to answer long questionnaires to participate in a trial.


We are precision matching patients to trials and trials to patients. Through our patient-centric approach, we are speeding up recruitment exponentially with the end goal of getting cures to the people who need them much more quickly

What’s more? The firm aims to use the Deep 6 AI software to improve additional aspects of the clinical trial process and enhance patient recruitment. “What we have built is a real-time, real-world evidence platform. We are trying to make sure that we can leverage that data to improve every part of the clinical trial value chain,” asserts Attanucci. For example, if a sponsor is working with a Deep 6 AI site, they can not only build their trial and publish it to their Trial Recommender but also share the study query with the PIs at the site. This automatically enables them to identify all the potential patients in their network and validate them based on the source data. Alongside, Deep 6 AI is revamping its marketing efforts for the formal rollout into the Life Sciences industry in the upcoming months. “It will provide primary care physicians with and understanding of and access to all potential trials that are out there and available for their individual patients,” states Attanucci. “We are going to allow sponsors to publish the trials into a clinical trial marketplace, this will then allow patients to be matched based on the inclusion/exclusion and provide access to other supporting materials.” Through these efforts, Deep 6 AI is poised to grow in the clinical trials space while solving niche problems.

Deep 6 AI News

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Partners with Deep 6 AI to Launch an AI Program for Clinical Trials

PASADENA - Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) and Deep 6 AI announced a collaboration, joining forces to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) within TTUHSC's electronic medical record (EMR) system to improve patient access to clinical trials.

TTUHSC is set to leverage Deep 6 AI for the real-time, precise matching of patients with suitable clinical trials. This advancement will enable researchers to swiftly identify appropriate trial candidates within minutes, significantly alleviating the operational demands on their staff. The integration of AI tools into TTUHSC's research process will ultimately broaden patient participation in clinical trials, and any emerging therapies can be applied to patients more expeditiously. This collaboration serves to enhance the scope of the Deep 6 AI ecosystem, which encompasses millions of distinct patient records and numerous trial sites. These resources are made available to sponsors for their research initiatives.

"Clinical trials are extremely valuable because they provide patients with opportunities to access therapies they otherwise would not have access to," John Griswold, M.D., executive director of the TTUHSC Clinical Research Institute said. "This collaboration with Deep 6 AI will enhance our ability to bring cutting-edge treatments to our community."

Identifying patients who meet the precise criteria required for a clinical study is recognized as a notably time-intensive aspect of clinical research. Deep 6 AI employs natural language processing to meticulously comb through an extensive array of structured and unstructured Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data elements. These include physician notes, lab reports, outpatient notes, radiology reports, genomics results, and pathology reports. The objective is to accurately align patients with the most suitable clinical trials based on these data points. This procedure streamlines the patient recruitment process and enables administrators to concentrate on patient well-being and the effective management of trials. This becomes particularly significant in situations where staff availability is limited.

"Traditionally, matching the right patient to the right clinical trial is a manual, laborious, and cumbersome process that falls on the shoulders of already overburdened clinicians," said Wout Brusselaers, CEO, Deep 6 AI. "By integrating with TTUHSC's EMR, Deep 6 AI's software platform can precision-match patients to trials in minutes. This saves clinicians' time, accelerates and de-risks research efforts, and brings life-changing therapies to TTUHSC patients faster."

Top 10 eClinical Trial Management Solutions Companies – 2022

Company
Deep 6 AI

Management
Jason Attanucci, VP, Life Sciences

Description
Deep 6 AI disrupts the clinical trial enrollment process by transforming the way researchers identify eligible patients. Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to mine structured and unstructured patient data, DEEP 6 AI finds more, better-matching patients for trials in minutes, not months.