Clinical trials often have a serious drawback: The people to whom medicines are administered in them are selected very strictly. Most clinical trials, for example, do not allow pregnant women. And most have age requirements. Additionally, most do not allow people with conditions other than those being tested.
This filtering process reduces the available pool of potential volunteers and also unnecessarily excludes many people who may benefit from the therapy. Artificial intelligence could change this sieve.
Red flags
A team of researchers from Stanford University, working with the biotechnology corporation Genentech, has developed a system based on artificial intelligence that can safely add clinical trial participants who may have been previously excluded.
The new system, called Pathfinder Trial, compares the survival outcomes of clinical trial participants included in a large database.
As the system analyzes the data, it learns more about which patients are more or less likely to experience problems in a clinical trial of a new drug, based on several factors, such as age, weight, whether they are pregnant, and their history. doctor. The system can then be used to emulate a clinical trial by including people who would have previously been filtered out. Finally, researchers can use the information from the system when setting criteria for their real-world clinical trial.
Testing real-world data on specific applications, such as certain types of cancers, showed that it is able to increase the allowable populations of volunteers in such drug trials by approximately 53%.
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The news
Artificial intelligence could allow people excluded from clinical trials to access them
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.