SBIR Phase I: An Online Peer-to-Peer Resource for Oncologists to Improve Clinical Trial Knowledge and Enrollment

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to put forth a solution to the critical problem of clinical trial enrollment, by improving awareness of clinical trials with physicians through technology that matches physician questions to relevant clinical trials via an online interactive social decision support platform. Patient enrollment is a significant weak link in the development pipeline and a significant pain point for organizations that sponsor clinical trials. More than two-thirds of trial sites fail to meet enrollment goals for a given trial, and up to 45% of study delays are caused by enrollment difficulties. This can result in lost revenues up to $1 million/day. Clinical trials are a critical link between scientific discovery and changes in clinical practice that advance prevention, treatments, and cures for diseases and disability. Increasing awareness of trials among physicians is key in increasing clinical trial enrollment, which in turn is essential in advancing health care practice as well as patient health and quality of life. While the area of cancer is an initial target for improved enrollment, ultimately the proposed solution can be applied to other medical specialties and be scaled globally using the same platform. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to drive clinical trial accrual by changing how physicians learn about clinical trials. The major innovation is combining a credible online social platform with powerful natural language processing technology and machine learning techniques to deliver customized clinical trial information to physicians in their decision-making process. For this Phase I project, the key objectives are: 1) To build out a prototype to match clinical trial information to relevant physician questions. Natural language processing (NLP) technology will be created to match clinical questions to related clinical trials so that physicians learn about clinical trials at the time they are seeking information on how to best treat their patients. 2) To conduct a pilot assessment of clinical trial knowledge pre- and post-use. A small subset of users of the social network platform will engage in a comparative assessment, pre- and post-exposure to the clinical trial component, to determine the technology?s impact on clinical trial knowledge. Successful completion of Phase I will result in a user-friendly platform that matches clinical questions to oncologists and relevant, open clinical trials, and will establish the technical and commercial feasibility of the proposed concept. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.