A group of students at American University is launching a product that seeks to increase accessibility to clinical trials for patients and physicians leveraging artificial intelligence.
“Finding a clinical trial should be a conversation, not a burdensome search placed on family members,” said Killian Lozach, a rising junior at AU who founded the company FindMyClinicalTrial, which is hoping to have its product available to hospitals and community health centers this fall.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ANNOUNCES $39 BILLION IN STUDENT DEBT RELIEF
Lozach told the Washington Examiner he came up with the idea to create the “Zillow of the clinical trial world” in October 2022 after reflecting on his personal experience with the medical system and his family’s inability to get a close family friend into a clinical trial for ovarian cancer.
The Food and Drug Administration administers the ClinicalTrials.gov database of all clinical trials, active and inactive, and is designed with research physicians in mind.
Although the FDA website has some features to ease user access, such as definitions and a search radius, Lozach saw the need to make a platform that makes finding a clinical trial more like online shopping rather than sifting through inapplicable medical jargon and research.
“There's hundreds of thousands of clinical trials,” Lozach said. “Some of them are already completed. Some of them aren't even recruiting yet. Some of them aren't even in the country. So where do you start?”
FindMyClinicalTrial draws data from the FDA website only on clinical trials actively enrolling participants to allow for doctors and patients to search for programs in their region that could fit their demographic and disease characteristics in a way that patients with limited medical literacy can utilize.
“It's really just a referral process,” Lozach said, “[but] it's made in a way that'll allow patients and doctors to do it in a much easier and faster way.”
Genevieve Satzinger, a rising junior and computer science major at AU who is working on the coding aspects of the project, told the Washington Examiner that the app also has a chatbot feature to further facilitate the conversational process in finding the right clinical trial.
“It is with AI that we can relieve the stress of having to perform exhaustive exploration for clinical trials,” Satzinger said. The user-friendly interface on both desktops and smartphones is also a significant improvement from the FDA website, she said.
The team of four AU students has been working closely with AU’s Entrepreneurship Incubator Program at the Kogod School of Business to get their project off the ground. Since Lozach pitched the project to the Incubator this spring, the team has gained traction and is looking to partner with a larger software development company to make the product more widely available.
Lozach and Satzinger both stressed a key element of FindMyClinicalTrial is to increase the diversity of clinical trial participants by improving ease of access. Their ultimate goal is to disseminate their product for free or at reduced cost to smaller community healthcare centers to widen participation, especially for ethnic and racial minorities and those from various income backgrounds.
In April 2022, the FDA began requiring clinicians and researchers applying for approval for clinical trials to submit diversity plans to represent racial and ethnic minority groups that have different genetic propensities for possible side effects and underlying conditions adequately.
“Going forward, achieving greater diversity will be a key focus throughout the FDA to facilitate the development of better treatments and better ways to fight diseases that often disproportionately impact diverse communities,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said at the time.
Lozach said that a lack of diversity in clinical trials creates “gaps in knowledge [that] can impede the quality of health care decision making, ability to counsel people on ways to reduce their risk, optimal treatment responses, and even the development of more effective medications or interventions.”
While FindMyClinicalTrial is looking for angel investors and larger partners to grow their platform, Lozach said he is hopeful about the future of his team’s endeavor.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“There’s a lot of companies that are trying to do similar things, but they’re only doing it for oncology or … cardiovascular disease,” Lozach said. “We’re hoping to kind of expand that and put all these things [together] and be the [go-to] service for this.”
“We see a great potential to expand,” he said.