Accelerating How Eligible Patients are Matched to Clinical Trials

Nearly 25% of patients diagnosed with cancer at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre are eligible for clinical trials.

However, matching patients to trials is a highly manual and time-consuming process that can take anywhere between 2 hours and 4 weeks to complete – time that is essential for patient care.

CDI’s Grand Challenge winner, a team led by Dr. Trevor Pugh, aims to greatly reduce the time, effort, and resources required to match patients to clinical trials by using an unprecedented level of automation and scalability. The new computational platform, Clinical Trial Integrated Matching System (CTIMS), uses a “digital fingerprint” comprised of genomic, pathology and clinical data to match patients to the best clinical trials. By using digital innovation, CTIMS will:

੶ Easily create and validate clinical trial criteria in a secure and userfriendly form

੶ Add new clinical trial criteria to target increasingly specific details

੶ Automatically convert criteria into a clinical trial markup language (CTML)1 used to securely match patient data to clinical trial criteria

੶ View clinical trial matches alongside cancer genomic patient data

੶ Use existing clinical data standards such as those established by the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Cancer Centre Network (MOHCCN) to align with other UHN and national initiatives

The CTIMS project is a collaboration between CDI and Dr. Trevor Pugh, Prasanna Kumar Jagannathan, Suzanne Trudel, Philippe Bedard, Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Marian Tang, Sophie Cooke, Anton Sukhovatkin, Mickey Ng, Adam Badzynski, and Sharon Narine.

1 Created by Dana Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School

What is the CDI Grand Challenge?

CDI’s annual Grand Challenge is an open call for applications to support bold, innovative, and high impact projects across the spectrum of cancer care. CTIMS is the winner of the 2022-2023 CDI Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge competition offers support in front-end and back-end development, data science, design, and project management. Winning projects are selected based on their alignment with CDI priorities, contribution to the PM community, feasibility, and impact.