Improving patient matching to therapy via streamlining clinical trial eligibility criteria to guide precision oncology

Studies have shown that enrolment in clinical trials has a significant impact on patient survival. Yet less than six per cent of newly diagnosed adult cancer patients in Canada participate in them. In some provinces, like Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, participation drops below one per cent. This isn’t due to a lack of interest – studies show up  to 70 per cent of patients are willing to participate – but rather due to structural challenges in connecting patients with the right trials. 

To address these challenges, a team of Ontario-based researchers partly funded by the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN) is creating PMATCH, a novel software platform that will help accelerate the matching of patients with existing clinical trials to increase participation and access.  

“Currently, when a patient is diagnosed with cancer, healthcare professionals must gather a large amount of the patient’s medical information and evaluate complex eligibility criteria from ongoing clinical trials to find a good match,” explain Drs. Trevor Pugh and Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Senior Scientists at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, who are co-leading the project. “This is a cumbersome process, which we are hoping to streamline through the creation of this software.” 

By using data that is already part of clinical records, PMATCH will help make the process of matching patients to clinical trials more efficient, allowing more cancer patients to be screened and considered for trial opportunities. This will particularly help lower barriers for patients in remote and rural areas where human resources needed to match patients to clinical trials is limited, increasing their ability to access valuable health services. 

“Precision oncology trials are expensive to conduct, and many trials struggle to enroll enough participants to answer the research questions being studied,” says Dr. Pugh. “By using PMATCH to find the right people quickly, we can improve patients’ access to high-quality care, help researchers develop better therapies, and save money in the process.” 

To ensure scalability, the tool will be built using data standards developed by the MOHCCN and deployed by Network members across the country. It will also leverage the clinical and genomic data that already exists as part of the Gold Cohort to match patients to clinical trials based on the unique genomic and clinical characteristics of their tumour. 

As a first step, the team will use existing cancer clinical trials at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre to test and develop the tool. They then hope to install the software at Network member sites (starting with BC Cancer) to connect patients to ongoing clinical trials across the country. In time, they plan to make the tool available directly to patients to help them learn about trials they may be eligible for and better prepare for conversations with their healthcare team. 

“The MOHCCN also helps bring a national scope to the PMATCH project,” says Dr. Haibe-Kains. “While this project would still be beneficial for a single institution in isolation, its value increases exponentially when patients can be matched with trials across Canada – and reciprocally when trials can recruit patients at a national scale.”