Antidote, the clinical trial tech startup formerly known as TrialReach, is gearing up to introduce a tool to automatically match patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) to clinical trials. The product builds on a collaboration with Eli Lilly ($LLY), Novartis ($NVS) and Pfizer ($PFE) to structure eligibility criteria and data.
To date, Antidote has focused on tackling the persistent problem of clinical trial enrollment by using natural language processing to make it easier for patients to find suitable studies and by providing researchers with a tool intended to simplify the creation of study pages patients can understand.
With the EHR product, Antidote is looking to leverage the digitization of healthcare to advance its patient-focused trial enrollment agenda.
“There's hundreds of millions of electronic health records now. We're building the other half of that around clinical trials,” Dean Sellis, chief architect at Antidote, told FierceBiotechIT.
This entails giving clinical trial information an equivalent structure to information housed in EHRs, at which point Sellis thinks it will be possible to match patients to clinical trials they are eligible for, and vice versa.
Antidote is aiming to have a minimum viable product out around the end of the year. That will mark a milestone in Sellis’ multiyear history with the EHR project. Sellis was part of the Lilly team that set out to make it easier for patients to find and understand clinical trials. That mission led to the creation of an API platform Lilly ultimately transferred--along with Sellis and two of his colleagues--to TrialReach.
"We're now working on the second phase of this where we take our structure eligibility and our matching platform, and we're going to build a set of APIs that allow healthcare providers … to integrate in various ways into our platform to automatically match patients to clinical trials," Sellis said.
Other companies are also working on using EHRs to match patients to clinical trials, an approach that has long been held up as a key step in the convergence of healthcare and research and a facilitator of timely study enrollment. Earlier this year, a doctor at Mount Sinai talked up the impact of Clinithink’s CLiX Enrich for Clinical Trials on enrollment in a Phase III trial of a Bayer diabetic kidney disease asset. And Patient iP won a Microsoft Health Innovation Award for its EHR-enabled trial-matching offering.
Antidote sees itself as coming at the idea of matching patients to trials from a slightly different angle, in part because it is getting deep into the structuring of data about clinical trials.
"As far as we know, and based on our conversations with the White House Moonshot team, we are the only team structuring all the clinical trial data," Sarah Kerruish, chief strategy and growth officer at Antidote, said. "People are doing it selectively for selected groups of trials, but no one's doing it for the entire body of trials."
Antidote teased the introduction of the EHR product in a release to reveal its rebranding. Having been known as TrialReach since opening its doors in 2009, the company is now going by the name of Antidote.