The Biden Cancer Initiative’s Oncology Clinical Trial Information Commons (OCTIC) is a shared platform where information about clinical trials can be stored and accessed for patient matching and other data mining.

The system employs one set of terms and rules through a simple interface providing patient selection criteria, trial locations and patient participation requirements, and is intended to be compatible with all parts of the clinical trials ecosystem.

What happened?

Precision medicine and clinical trial matching specialist Massive Bio is partnering with the Biden Cancer Initiative’s OCTIC with the aim of improving access and reducing redundancies.

Currently, many patients are unable to find the clinical trial options that would be relevant for them, and publicly available information about clinical trials is not readily searchable due to syntax inaccuracy—all things the OCTIC aims to improve.

Massive Bio’s precision medicine approach is based on a genetic understanding of the patient, allowing doctors to better select treatments most likely to help those patients.

The company provides clinical trial services such as patient identification, pre-screening, site selection and real-world evidence services. Massive Bio’s Synergy AI machine learning engine identifies clinical trial options for patients from institutions across the world and helps patients choose which trials, if any, would best support their cancer treatment.

Why it matters?

Massive Bio has also pulled together a network of physicians, diagnosticians and clinical sub-specialists from 25 cancer research and treatment facilities in the U.S., which could help patients who were not candidates for clinical trials.

From this list of experts, the company decided to form a Virtual Tumor Board for each new patient, working to formulate a care plan that recommends testing and treatment options from across the globe.

What is the trend?

Among the other founding members of the OCTIC platform are Cancer Commons, Ciitizen, EmergingMed, GenomOncology, Sarah Cannon Research Institute, IBM Watson Health and Syapse.

The members have agreed to work to create a first release of OCTIC tools before the 2020 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

In April, Massive Bio announced it was partnering with Admera Health as an active participant in Synergy-AI registry, focusing on biomarker data and clinical trial matching in precision oncology studies.

Admera’s mission is to help develop and provide the next wave of molecular-based portfolio of technology innovations and services, and the company also provides genomics and bioinformatics services to customers wishing to conduct research in a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments environment.

Sutter Health and biomedical informatics and data management DNAnexus also recently forged a precision medicine partnership to improve personalized treatments for people with multiple sclerosis (MS).

The research teams will collect, process and analyze EHR data of up to 3,000 patients to create personalized care plans for people with MS.

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.

Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com

Twitter: @dropdeaded209