ICON, a provider of drug development solutions, said it’s working with IBM to help reduce the time and costs of drug development while also offering patients enhanced quality of care by connecting them to relevant clinical trials. ICON said it will tap Watson’s cognitive computing power to help the process of identifying patients who meet the criteria for a clinical trial, and to analyze protocols to assess trial feasibility and identify optimal trial sites.
Initially, ICON is applying Watson Clinical Trial Matching to its breast, lung, colon and rectal cancer trials.
The solution enables ICON to advise sponsors how many patients match their trial criteria, where they are located and how they will recruit them.
IBM’s Watson Health Cloud will facilitate access to de-identified patient data, including 50 million patient records contained in the data set from Explorys. At the same time, ICON enhances IBM Watson’s capabilities by providing expertise into clinical trial protocols and clinical operations.
More than $1.3 billion is spent on patient recruitment by drug developers each year and yet fewer than 5% of cancer patients participate in a clinical trial. It takes 6-12 months to start up a global phase III drug trial and another 12 months to enroll the required number of patients.
“Recruiting the required number of patients for clinical trials is a constant challenge for our customers and can represent more than 30% of total study costs. ICON’s Chief Operating Officer, Steve Cutler, said in a statement. “By applying IBM Watson to our clinical trials, we have the potential to revolutionize clinical trial feasibility, patient recruitment and study start-up timelines which will help our customers take significant time and cost from their development programs.”
