Some History Around This Date
Clinical Trials Day, May 20th, brings awareness to clinical trials, but most importantly it celebrates and recognizes the people who run clinical trials and their contribution towards improving health. May 20th marks the anniversary of what is considered to be the first randomized clinical trial, performed in 1747 by James Lind1. He conducted a controlled clinical trial that compared six treatments for scurvy in 12 sailors with scurvy who all lived in the same quarters and had the same diet. He was able to identify that the two men who were treated with fresh citrus had the most positive results, however he never concretely recommended this treatments as a cure for scurvy and continued to find other remedies since fresh citrus was in limited supply. Lind is recognized for his experimental methods when conducting this study, attempting to compare similar subjects, thus reducing confounding variables2. You can learn more about James Lind and his achievements here.
Clinical Trials Today: impacting lives in the precision medicine era
Clinical trials today have obviously advanced way beyond this approach; however, we can still see how trials are rooted in Lind’s work, analyzing different treatments to identify their effects on a disease. Clinical trial work today is not only more advanced but being conducted on a much larger scale and across the world. Since 1999 over 671,000 clinical trials have been registered with the World Health Organization, with just under 60,000 being registered in 2021 alone. These trials increase access and knowledge of experimental treatments.
Currently, there are around 4,000 active trials that are using targeted biomarkers associations for oncology. To truly test the efficacy and effectiveness of these drugs, it is imperative to find patients with compatible biomarker signatures for the treatment. As diagnostic testing advances, these biomarker signatures can become more and more specific.
Running these clinical trials would not be possible without the clinical research professionals that support them. These individuals work across a variety of functions and to maintain the integrity of the research through a wide range of duties including data collection, recruitment, development of documentation, education and so much more. We at SOPHiA GENETICS are happy to take time to recognize these individuals and we thank them for all they do to advance research, medicine, and care.
SOPHiA GENETICS Helps Sites Gather and Analyze Multimodal Data in their Population of Interest
In one of our ongoing clinical studies in lung cancer, the DEEP-Lung-IV study, we aim to leverage deep learning-enabled analysis to aggregate multimodal data (e.g., clinical, biological, genomic, and radiomics data) to identify and validate predictive signatures associated with response to immunotherapy and prognosis of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.
This international and multicentric project addresses an important translational research question in a pragmatic way. Our collective intelligence receives many negative or positive predictive signals (clinical, imaging and molecular signals) in this area, yet it is currently unable to integrate them in an intelligible way. The goal of the DEEP-Lung-IV project is to integrate all these individual, discrete predictive signals into an artificial intelligence-based framework to enable us to make this information intelligible and thus allow us to intelligently choose the first line of treatment for our patients.Pr. Jacques Cadranel, Sorbonne Université and AP-HP Hôpital Tenon – Paris, France
SOPHiA GENETICS Supports Clinical Trial Recruitment with SOPHiA DDM Trial Match.
Accelerate biomarker-driven participant recruitment, even in rare biomarker cohorts with SOPHiA DDM Trial Match. This real-time site and patient identification analytical solution enables you to optimize clinical trial site selection ahead of clinical trial set up and supports your trial rescue strategy by finding additional centers for ongoing trials not meeting recruitment goals. Learn more about how SOPHiA DDM Trial Match can support identifying your targeted trial population.
- “Clinical Trials Day.” Clinical Trials Day, https://www.clinicaltrialsday.org/#clinical-trials-day.
- Milne, Iain. “Who Was James Lind, and What Exactly Did He Achieve.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 105, no. 12, 2012, pp. 503–508., https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2012.12k090.