Pacific Cancer Care and Deep Lens announced that they are collaborating to optimise clinical trial matching and accelerate enrollment at the Monterey-based practice through the use of Deep Lens’ artificial-intelligence (AI) based solutions and other services. Pacific Cancer Care is the largest haematology and oncology practice on the California Central Coast. Deep Lens is a digital healthcare company that helps community oncology practices improve and expand clinical research programs through the use of their proprietary AI solution, VIPER. This partnership will expand Pacific Cancer Care’s existing clinical trial offering to patients by more accurately and effectively identifying eligible patients for trials, improving communications between patient care teams and bringing more trials to the practice.

“Clinical trials are not only critical to the advancement of new therapeutic options for cancer, but they present a unique opportunity for patients to access novel treatments well in advance of their commercialization, some of which may help positively impact the state of their disease,” said Zach Koontz, M.D., an oncologist at Pacific Cancer Care.

It is estimated that more than 15,000 oncology clinical trials are actively recruiting patients; however, fewer than 1 in 30 patients participate in a clinical trial. Limited trial site resources make it time-consuming to identify eligible patients, especially as trial protocols increase in complexity. VIPER supports care teams by automating the identification of potentially eligible patients at the time of diagnosis and easily matching them to relevant trials.

“Pacific Cancer Care already has an extremely comprehensive clinical research program – they’ve been the first site to offer access to certain therapies via clinical trials and they place great importance on the role that clinical research plays in the overall acceleration of our knowledge and treatment of cancer,” said Simon Arkell, president and co-founder at Deep Lens.

Deep Lens’ VIPER will pre-screen all patients from Pacific Cancer Care’s EMR (OncoEMR) and integrate molecular data feeds from Caris Life Sciences, Foundation Medicine and Guardant Health as well as all pathology feeds to automatically identify qualified patients for clinical trials. Deep Lens pre-screening and clinical trial matching solutions are provided at no cost to oncology practices.