Areas of Opportunity for AI in Clinical Research

van Harten: I think in general, access to clinical trials is a big deal, especially for people from underrepresented communities, and we believe that artificial intelligence plays a big role in changing that. Right now, the way to clinical trials and the way clinical trials are set up, often creates barriers that are very tough to overcome. Many trial sites are concentrated in big cities or academic medical centers, so if you live in a rural or underserved area, just getting to a trial might be out of reach, and for some people, there are also a lot of financial challenges like treatment costs or logistical challenges like transportation, and these burdens hit underrepresented populations especially hard, as well as people with lower incomes.

McAllister: You hear a lot about automated prescreening and engagement of patients with AI voice in call screen, and actually engage these patients directly with very human like capability, and that's a huge lift for sites. In my time actually working at a site network, it was a massive pain for all of our research coordinators to have to call, say we're doing a vaccine study and we have 10,000 potential candidates. How do you call 10,000 of those people to try to screen them into a trial. AI can really take the front-end lift of that, take the initial outreach, and then hand it off to a human to really close the deal and bring them in for the study.