COLUMBUS, Ohio & SCARBOROUGH, Maine– Deep Lens and New England Cancer Specialists (NECS) today announced that they have entered into a strategic collaboration to deploy artificial-intelligence (AI)-based clinical trial matching solution, VIPER™, into the NECS network. The Deep Lens’ VIPER platform uses proprietary cloud-based technology to facilitate, triage and accelerate the clinical trial recruitment process. NECS is the region’s largest medical oncology group and serves patients in five locations across Maine and New Hampshire. NECS is also a part of the National Cancer Care Alliance, a group of independent oncology practices with more than 100 locations in the U.S. NECS has a comprehensive clinical trial program that has been in existence for more than 40 years. The integration of VIPER will improve efficiencies and help automate the complex process involved with trial recruitment by identifying and matching eligible patients to trials right at the time of diagnosis.
“Clinical research is critical for advancing new therapies and care for cancer patients and we are enthusiastic about broadening our clinical trial offering with the inclusion of VIPER,” said Christian Thomas, M.D., director of clinical research at NECS. “We look forward to testing the speed, efficacy and reporting capabilities of VIPER in our research department. We are committed to ensuring that every patient we see has the opportunity to access the newest therapies in development and receive the best possible care for their specific diagnosis. The integration of VIPER will allow us to expand opportunities for patients and free up research resources.”
It is estimated that more than 15,000 oncology clinical trials are actively recruiting patients; however, patient participation in these trials is often as low as three percent. Limited site capacity and resources play a role in the challenge to recruit and enroll, as well as low patient engagement. All of these challenges have been magnified by the current global pandemic. VIPER automates the clinical trial screening process and seamlessly matches patients — at the time of diagnosis — to appropriate trials through the ingestion and analysis of customized genomic data, electronic medical records and pathology data.
“The clinical trial program at NECS is already extremely comprehensive — the team prioritizes emerging research and takes a proactive role in patient education and engagement,” said Greg Andreola, chief revenue officer at Deep Lens. “However, with the increasing number of precision medicine trials that include very complex and narrow eligibility criteria, study sites often find it challenging and labor intensive to manage the recruitment process themselves. We’re excited to help NECS include VIPER and other Deep Lens services to recruit more eligible patients to their trials portfolio.”
Deep Lens’ VIPER will be integrating directly to the NECS EMR (Flatiron Health’s OncoEMR), molecular data feeds (Caris Life Sciences and Tempus) and pathology feeds to automatically identify qualified patients for clinical trials. Like NECS, any practice that utilizes OncoEMR can easily integrate VIPER and all other Deep Lens screening services free of charge.
