The Biden Cancer Initiative has announced that nine healthcare innovators are joining forces to create the Oncology Clinical Trial Information Commons (OCTIC), a shared platform where information about clinical trials can be stored and accessed for patient matching and other data mining.
The system will employ a single set of terms and rules, and a user-friendly interface for biopharma companies to readily enter and update their trials.
The information will include patient selection criteria, trial locations, and patient participation requirements, all in a consistent, machine-readable format. OCTIC will provide a mechanism for clinical trial sponsors and investigators to mark certain selection parameters for private disclosure, available for patient-matching but not to be publicly viewed, addressing the issue of proprietary selection criteria. Governance rules and mechanisms will be established to ensure appropriate access and use of the clinical trial information.
The founding members – BreastCancerTrials.org, Cancer Commons, Ciitizen, EmergingMed, GenomOncology, Genospace/Sarah Cannon Research Institute, IBM Watson Health, Massive Bio, and Syapse – have agreed to work cooperatively to create a first release of OCTIC tools before the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in 2020.
The Biden Cancer Initiative said the participants would meet to share their current technologies and approaches, and together, design a “best of all” solution that encompasses their collective understanding of technical requirements. Founding members will each decide which technologies to contribute to the combined solution, develop a plan on how to assemble it, work together to make the platform, and run pilot programs to test it.
The program is intended to be compatible with all parts of the clinical trials ecosystem. It can be single point of data entry for clinical trial sponsors and investigators. Government registry programs can read directly from it, making them better. Patient advocacy organizations, health institutions, and technology developers can connect to it in order to power their services. OCTIC won’t compete with anyone, rather will make many parts of the oncology clinical trial systems more efficient.
The Biden Cancer Initiative said it would work closely with the OCTIC members by facilitating meetings and partnerships, fostering pilot programs, and helping communicate progress.
In a blog post on the website Medium, Martin Naley, program lead, clinical trials acceleration at the Biden Caner Initiative, described some of the challenges with clinical trial patient matching and the goals of the new initiative.
