Massive Bio partners to use AI for oncology clinical trials
Perthera offers a ranked therapy recommendation based on a multi-omic profile of each patient’s cancer. This allows the company to recommend clinical trials specific to patients’ particular situation, and to provide physicians information to help treat the patient.
For its part, Massive Bio pulls data from various channels and merges real-time data sets to create a picture of patients eligible for clinical trials. The company uses automation to match patients to particular trials and then pre-screens the patients, with the process being overviewed by a clinical team.
Through the collaboration, the AI capabilities of both companies will be combined to identify suitable patients for clinical trials based on their molecular and genetic biomarkers.
Arturo Loaiza-Bonilla, co-founder and CMO of Massive Bio, outlined one of the advantages of working with another data-orientated business: “We are excited to expand our data sets and leverage our technologies and combined networks to offer more precise treatment paths, which will have an immediate and positive impact to identify more treatment options for more patients.”
While CEO of Perthera, Albert Kelly, outlined that the company expects the partnership to improve data acquisition and the accuracy of patient-trial matching.
According to Massive Bio, less than 3% of cancer patients are matched and enrolled in a clinical trial. When the company was first establishing its AI-enabled precision oncology clinical trial network, the company told Outsourcing-Pharma that it believed it could increase that to 15-20% of advanced-stage cancer patients.
At the beginning of this year, IQVIA’s Lucas Glass, a specialist in AI technology, explained that a recent major breakthrough in the use of the technology has been in the ability to find the correct patients for the correct trial using a patient-trial matching algorithm, as in the case of Massive Bio.
As such, Massive Bio was able to announce in September 2022 that it would expand its operations in Europe to provide its clinical trial matching services in the region.
The company hired three new team members to boost efforts in the region, including a head of strategy, regional manager, and clinical research and data manager. Backing the move into Europe was the $9m (€9.4m) the company raised through a Series B financing round in June 2022.
