Expanding Access Through a National Trial Navigation Model

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Shanthi Sivendran, MD, MSCR, MBA, senior vice president for cancer care support at the American Cancer Society, discussed the national expansion of the organization’s Access to Clinical Trials and Support (ACTS) program and its implications for improving cancer trial access and equity. Sivendran explained how the program addresses persistent barriers to trial participation—including geography, transportation, lodging, financial burden, and limited awareness—through an end-to-end model that combines education, navigation, social support, and AI-enabled trial matching. She highlighted early utilization data from the program’s initial regional launch, underscoring the scale and complexity of patient-identified barriers, and emphasized the importance of integrating support services with precision trial matching. Sivendran also addressed broader industry challenges, including trial decentralization, narrative shifts around clinical research, and the need for more representative trial populations to ensure innovation reaches patients most affected by cancer.

The interview transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

ACT: How will the national expansion of ACS ACTS change how patients and providers navigate and access cancer clinical trials?

Sivendran: Yeah, thank you for that question. ACS ACTS is the American Cancer Society’s Access to Clinical Trials and Support program. We recognize, as you do as well, that clinical trials are such an important, such a critical part of cancer innovation and getting potentially lifesaving trials to patients. But accessing them and being able to get to them is so difficult.

I’ll give you the example. I like to say that I live—I’m a medical oncologist as well—and I conveniently live an hour and a half from every major academic center. And my patients, when they want to be able to access clinical trials, they can be interested in doing it, but they have questions like, how do I find out about those clinical trials? How do I get to my clinical trial when I’m an hour and a half from home? Where do I stay so that I can participate in that clinical trial?

So our program attempts to address those things. We’re looking at an end-to-end clinical trial matching service, so that patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals have a one-stop shop—one place that they can contact the American Cancer Society, either by calling us or through our web portal—and get connected. They can get educated on clinical trials, and for us to find out what are the barriers. Are you having trouble getting to your clinical trial? Are you having trouble getting to your care? And having us help address those through the many support programs that we have.

And then for those that are interested in matching to a clinical trial and taking that next step, we work with our biotech company partner, Massive Bio, to do AI clinical trial matching through ClinicalTrials.gov to get the best possible clinical match for a patient. And then make sure that patients understand their options, that we keep the healthcare team in the loop, and that we try to mitigate the barriers that get you to that clinical trial.

So we’re really excited about it. We launched in the Northeast region at the end of February of this year. It was really popular. There was a need for it, and actually, half of our patients were calling from outside of the Northeast region. And we realized that we want to make sure that every patient gets what they need. And so just a few short weeks ago, we expanded nationally.