Precision Matching Meets Practical Support

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: Which elements of ACS ACTS—specialist support, social-needs screening, or AI matching—are most impactful for improving trial equity?

Sivendran: Yeah, and you can’t just pick one, so I can’t—I’m not going to pick one. And I think that’s what we really saw. So there are other services like this out there where patients can get a list of clinical trial matches. And there are services out there. I think that’s probably the most common thing that you see.

But what we find is, if you can have a list of clinical trial matches, for example, and that list might have 25 trials on it, because you’re not getting the closest match possible. And what I love about this program is that working with our tech partners, we’re trying to get the closest match possible. So we’re mining your electronic health record. We’re understanding, have you had all the appropriate testing, for example, maybe biomarker testing, so that we can get you that closest match possible.

So I say this with my American Cancer Society hat on, with ACS ACTS, but also with my medical oncologist hat on. I use the program because I’m in Pennsylvania, and my patients will get five to seven really good matches that are laid out from closest to farther away. So, do they have to travel to Philadelphia or Baltimore or New York City, or is there something local, closer to home for them?

So I love that part of it. But in all of those cases, what we’re seeing is that you can give people a list of matches, and they can be really good matches, but if they can’t get to their appointment, it doesn’t matter, right?

So we know that transportation—and a lot of work that’s been done by the American Cancer Society and others—shows that things like transportation and lodging are major barriers in getting good quality cancer care and major barriers in getting good quality clinical trial care.

So first you have to ask. We can’t be in that magic space where people don’t have barriers because we don’t ask. So that’s a really deliberate part of our program, asking patients what are the barriers to getting good quality care and then addressing those through our program.

And then I think the third is just understanding that clinical trials are an option for you. There’s so many—you’ve probably seen this—patients and their loved ones are scared. Am I a guinea pig? Am I going to get the placebo? All these things.

And so we have this real opportunity through the program and through our cancer information specialists to do a lot of good education around clinical trials as a third anchor component.

So you really can’t make me choose. I’m really going to choose all of those because they’re all such critical components, and I think unique components of our program when you put them all together.