Thermo Fisher Scientific Partners with Medidata Acorn AI to Optimize Clinical Research Site Selection and Speed Patient Enrollment in Clinical Trials

Thermo Fisher Scientific has announced a multiyear partnership with Medidata Acorn AI, a Dassault Systèmes company. Through this partnership, the PPD clinical research business of Thermo Fisher has collaborated with Medidata to develop PPD TrueCast, a comprehensive enterprise application combining extensive patient recruitment and site performance data with predictive models and advanced analytics. Offering one of the industry’s most wide-ranging representations of real-time site performance combined with machine learning, this new platform gives pharmaceutical and biotech companies actionable insights to optimize clinical research site selection, trial enrollment and study cycle times.

“The clinical trial industry continues to demand new tools in big data and predictive analytics to improve trial planning and execution and accelerate clinical trials,” said David M Johnston, Ph.D., senior vice president and president, clinical research, Thermo Fisher Scientific. “As a result of the vast site-level data amassed by PPD and Medidata, customers now have even greater visibility into how a trial is performing for any study our clinical research business is helping them run. We already have successfully deployed these machine learning-based insights to give us a competitive site selection advantage in the crowded trial landscape.”

TrueCast creates value for biopharmaceutical companies at multiple points along the clinical trial life cycle by delivering deep site-performance data in real time from an extensive global footprint of trial sites. The platform utilizes advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models to forecast cycle times and enrollment performance, enabling simplified scenario planning and optimized country and site selection. During a study’s enrollment period, TrueCast automatically tracks study performance and predicts enrollment risk. When mitigation is needed, the application provides access to real-time site performance metrics to identify high-performing sites.

“AI and advanced analytics play an increasingly critical role in a rapidly changing clinical trial environment," said Fareed Melhem, senior vice president, Medidata Acorn AI. "We’re delighted to be working side by side with Thermo Fisher’s clinical research business to combine our technology, data and expertise. Together, we are now offering companies new ways to rethink their clinical trials through access to live, cross-industry site performance data.”

The TrueCast platform builds upon one of the industry’s most extensive site-level data assets. Thermo Fisher’s clinical research business reflects data from 40,000 sites, 50,000 investigators and more than 2,000 studies. Medidata’s unique datasets have been generated from its experience with more than 26,000 clinical trials and nearly 8 million patients in more than 140 countries across the globe. As a result of this powerful dataset and proprietary machine learning-based site recommendation models, the average Phase III study enrollment period was reduced by an average of 1.5 months in retrospective trial simulations when site recommendation models were utilized to select a portion of the country and site footprint.