Israeli Startup Helps Cancer Patients Find Relevant Clinical Trials

Cancer patients often face a long and difficult battle with a disease that, according to the World Health Organization, is among the top ten causes of death worldwide. For many, finding the right treatment option becomes a complex and exhausting task, as they have to study the specifics of traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy, surgical methods, and review thousands of clinical trials of experimental anti-cancer drugs and alternative methods.

Some companies are developing special services aimed at easing the task for cancer patients in finding the optimal therapy option. By using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automated data processing algorithms, they create relevant services and search mechanisms designed to help cancer patients determine their course of action, especially when it comes to clinical trials through which doctors hope to discover and improve new treatment methods and drugs against cancer.

Take, for example, the New York-based company Belong, founded by two Israeli entrepreneurs. It has developed a social network for cancer patients that facilitates their access to the opinions of authoritative medical professionals and allows them to communicate with people who have similar diagnoses. This is a unique platform through which cancer patients can ask professionals their questions, connect with other patients, and use Belong's own service to find suitable clinical trials.

However, as experience has shown, finding the necessary trials is quite a challenging task. The Google search engine can easily confuse patients looking for the optimal experimental treatment. Treating doctors and oncologists, in turn, simply cannot keep track of the thousands of studies currently being conducted worldwide. According to data from the publication Applied Clinical Trials from 2007, even companies that specialize in finding the necessary medical studies can "create additional difficulties" for patients and provoke an "obvious conflict of interest," considering that special services are usually promoted by sponsors.

Perhaps this is why, as statistics show, the number of people registering to participate in clinical trials is currently rapidly declining.

Personal Experience: How the New Startup Was Born

TrialJectory, a startup launched last year with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, aims to optimize the process of finding suitable medical studies for patients. The idea for the project belongs to the CEO and co-founder of the company, Tzvia Bader, who has extensive experience in high technology, particularly related to massive databases, and has herself gone through a challenging journey battling cancer.

"I was lucky to live near New York and have good health insurance, so I had the opportunity to go to the Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center— where I was offered to join a clinical trial," Bader says. After one unsuccessful trial, she registered for another, which turned out to be successful and helped her beat cancer. "I wanted my decision to be as well thought out and balanced as possible, so before agreeing to participate in specific studies, I monitored the internet for a long time and was shocked that I couldn't find even the slightest information about them," she adds.

Bader first encountered the difficulties of finding suitable medical trials twenty years ago when her mother was diagnosed with a malignant tumor. She says their oncologist did not have the necessary information, and she had to spend days and nights online to find any data. "Nineteen years have passed since then, I was diagnosed with a tumor, and nothing has changed – I still can't find the necessary information," she notes. "In the end, this search became something of a passion, an obsession for me."

How the Service Works

TrialJectory operates through a free interactive website. A patient can register on the company's site and provide information about their condition and diagnosis. According to Bader, the main difficulty in finding suitable studies lies in the need to consider specific criteria depending on the type and stage of cancer, as well as other individual characteristics of each patient.

She assures that TrialJectory provides such search accuracy: "Based on the patient profile we have, we run an algorithm to find optimal clinical trials for them, so instead of several hundred results, they receive two, three, or five, but precisely those that best match their diagnosis, individual characteristics, and needs." To scan the vast number of studies and generate recommendations, the service uses an AI-based algorithm.

The new startup generates revenue from pharmaceutical companies conducting studies to which TrialJectory directs patients. "This is our principle, our mission, part of our values – we do not take money from patients," emphasizes Tzvia Bader. After the service selects study recommendations for a specific patient, it chooses the one that suits them best. Then TrialJectory contacts the pharmaceutical company conducting the selected study and organizes the patient's participation in it.

Bader notes that pharmaceutical companies have a strong incentive to pay for such a service. "Currently, 94% of all clinical trials are significantly behind schedule due to recruitment issues," she says. "Additionally, about 30% of studies close at the third stage due to a lack of participants." All of this, according to her, is a compelling reason for such companies to invest in a service that can provide them with candidate participants.

According to data from the startup's official website, its database currently contains about 18,000 studies that require around 12 million participants.

Bader divides her competitors in the clinical trial matching market into three groups: independent recruiters, services operating based on specific hospitals, and search engines specializing in finding suitable studies.

Independent recruiters act as brokers, purchasing access to patient databases or receiving requests from patients and connecting with those who meet the criteria of various clinical trials. Bader notes that although such recruiters generally succeed in finding the necessary studies for specific patients, their methods are "low-tech" and "narrow-scale." Nevertheless, TrialJectory views them as potential partners.

Services functioning based on medical centers operate similarly to independent recruiters, but unlike them, they use their own databases when selecting optimal clinical studies for their patients. Other companies develop and apply specialized search engines. One of the most well-known belongs to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which private companies have attempted to enhance with their own software. Such search engines, however, as Bader notes, yield too many results, often undermining the patient's efforts to find a suitable study.

On the startup's services, which launched in December last year, several hundred clients have already registered. Currently, TrialJectory is focused on finding optimal studies for melanoma patients and plans to launch similar services for patients with colorectal and breast cancer in the near future. Meanwhile, the company is negotiating with pharmaceutical firms, but according to Bader, it is still too early to name specific names.

TrialJectory is currently in the investment-raising stage and has already raised about half a million dollars from private investors in the high-tech sector. Additionally, it is negotiating with venture capital firms to raise further funds.

Digital Health and Empowering Patients

The concept of TrialJectory is an example of ideas promoted by digital health companies, namely – empowering each patient. Advanced technologies in telemedicine, artificial intelligence, social networks, and diagnostics increasingly allow patients to take charge of their health alongside their treating physicians. More and more people are seeking a "second opinion" from doctors after having self-diagnosed using various online resources. All of this leads to a rethinking of the patient's role as a "consumer."

TrialJectory provides its users with free and direct access to information for which they would have to pay when consulting specialists. The system is also designed to educate patients about the variety of options available to them, allowing them to make more informed, personalized decisions.