Collaborative effort taps AI to enhance clinical trials

The virtual assistant has been used by businesses in recent years to run data collection and analysis, with a natural language engine able to understand and respond to conversational speech.
Jeff Rowe

We’ve noted a couple times recently the move to enlist AI in the development of new drugs, and now a similar move is being made to use the new technologies to speed up and improve clinical trials.

Digital life sciences technology developers Stefanini Group and CliniOps have announced the release of a new platform, dubbed TRUST, that is aimed at helping medical researchers digitize and automate trials from the study building phase to support decentralized, virtual and hybrid trial capabilities.

Specifically, the platform is built on the Stefanini Group’s AI virtual assistant, ‘Sophie,’ which will automate processes resulting in significant time and cost reduction, and ultimately faster trials. According to the Stefanini Group, Sophie can also act as Help Desk support, study manager, answer clinician queries and questions, gather information from social listening and retrieve documents to assist users. If researchers choose, Sophie can also integrate with additional datasets from within the platform or using public sources of information such as ClinicalTrial.gov and PubMed.

“Our goal at Stefanini Group is to use the latest digital technologies to transform life science business functions,” Stefanini vice president of innovation and digital business Renata Galle said in a statement. “Our TRUST platform unifies the trial process, eliminating multiple vendors and high costs to increase efficiency and improve ROI.”

The Trust platform is built on Stefanini Life Science unit’s 20 years of experience supporting large and mid-size clients globally in clinical services.

“A true one-of-a-kind in the market, the Trust platform provides customers with the opportunity to impact more patients,” says Nagesh Jadhav, director of digital transformation and innovation at Stefanini Life Sciences. “With digital and e-clinical solutions, the platform will be a game changer with increased transparency, insights, visibility, and audit readiness, ultimately resulting in faster trials.”

Founded in 2013, CliniOps is a data science for life science company that supports digital trials leveraging AI, mobile, analytics, cloud, sensors, and connected devices. CliniOps is headquartered in Fremont, Calif., with offices in India.

“The outbreak of a global pandemic has put many trials on hold and accelerated the need for digital and remote data capabilities,” said Avik Pal, CEO at CliniOps. “New processes need to be adapted to restart trials and transform them moving forward.”