We are excited to take part in the Clinical Trial Innovation prize. There are a number of factors that are responsible for low enrollment rates in clinical trials. We are focusing on low physician awareness and engagement as a barrier to clinical trial enrollment. The physician is the gatekeeper for clinical trial enrollment and research has shown that individual physicians play a more significant role in recruiting patients in to clinical trials than even availability of patients. Specifically, the barriers we are addressing are

The lack of awareness about clinical trials among community physicians (Community physicians are those practicing in a non-academic setting such as private practice or local hospitals)

We will do this by targeting relevant information about clinical trials to the physician community on theMednet.org. theMednet.org is an online community of US based oncologists that discuss how to treat clinical situations not covered in guidelines or published research. All conversations happen in the form of Questions and Answers, where physicians from the community ask questions about how to treat a clinical situation and experts from academic medical centers answer them. Over 2,200 radiation and medical oncologists now use the platform on a regular basis.

Our solution is to target physicians with 3 types of messages about clinical trials on the website

  1. Answers from experts to questions about how to treat different situations that are related to the clinical trail that we want to build awareness about
  2. Targeted content on-site about clinical trials that are relevant to a physician’s practice patterns and geography
  3. Targeted emails from PIs about clinical trials that are relevant to physicians that are likely to enroll patients in to a particular trial

We have now built much of the technology to enable these three solutions. We look forward to working with the Addario Lung Cancer Foundation to identify a partner that will work with us to identify a principal investigator to work with to build awareness around a trial they are involved with.