UH Streamlines Matching of Patients to Clinical Trials, Therapies

Cleveland-based University Hospitals (UH) Seidman Cancer Center is deploying new solutions to help scale its precision oncology program and streamline the matching of patients to the growing number of clinical trials and therapies available.

UH Seidman Cancer Center is part of the National Cancer Institute-designated Case Comprehensive Cancer Center at Case Western Reserve University, one of 51 comprehensive cancer centers in the country. UH is deploying the Precision Decision and GO Connect solutions from a Cleveland-based company called GenomOncology.

In order to streamline the matching of patients to clinical trials and therapies, UH needed access to all curated biomarker-based and institutional non-biomarker clinical trials. UH also needed a solution to identify cohorts of patients within their institution eligible for clinical trials and novel therapies, as well as the ability to perform feasibility analysis for opening new clinical trials across all UH Seidman Cancer Center wholly-owned locations.

Using these new solutions, UH can effectively and efficiently match patients to therapies, as well as relevant, open clinical trials, curated through GenomOncology's in-house curation team and partnerships with leading content institutions. UH follows recommended best practices of providing patients with options of enrolling in clinical trials, or utilizing a novel therapy, as potential treatment options. However, as the precision oncology industry continues to evolve, the number of options for clinical treatments continues to increase, making it difficult for a clinician to know all available treatment options for patients.

UH will use GenomOncology's GO Connect solution to ingest data from UH's clinical data warehouse and clinical trial matching system, and transform that data into usable information available within GenomOncology's Precision Decision product. By using the Precision Decision interface, UH will have the ability to identify and interact with all therapies and curated clinical trials in a single dashboard. This dashboard gives users the option to search for patients at their institution who could be eligible to enroll in open clinical trials, as well as those that may qualify for a newly approved therapy. The solution also enables the UH team to examine their internal database of patients' clinical and molecular profiles to determine the feasibility of opening new clinical trials.

Theodoros Teknos  M.D., UH Seidman Cancer Center president and scientific director, said the partnership establishes a new paradigm for patient care. "Due to the speed and complexity of genetic and biomarker discoveries, it is virtually impossible for any oncologist to remain current on all the clinical trials and newly approved cancer therapies,” he explained in a prepared statement. “Through this partnership with GenomOncology, we have leveraged the power of computing to process incredible amounts of data and identify the optimal care for every patient."