Coming out soon
We have developed a machine learning and rule based tool called the Clinical Trial Risk Tool using natural language processing. The Clinical Trial Risk Tool allows a user to upload a trial protocol and which categorises the protocol as high, medium, or low risk of ending uninformatively.
When a pharmaceutical company develops a drug, it needs to pass through several phases of clinical trials before it can be approved by regulators.
Before the trial is run, the drug developer writes a document called a protocol. This contains key information about how long the trial will run for, what is the risk to participants, what kind of treatment is being investigated, etc.
The tool is open-source under MIT licence and it does not save any of your data.
Currently, professionals at a funding organisation read the protocols and perform a subjective assessment of the trial’s cost, complexity, and risk of ending uninformatively.
One of the most common causes of a trial ending uninformatively is underpowering. There are several indicators of high risk of uninformativeness which can be identified in a protocol, such as a lack of and or an inadequate statistical analysis plan, use of non-standard endpoints, or the use of cluster randomisation. Low-risk trials are often run by well-known institutions with external funding and an international or intercontinental array of sites. These indicators can be referred to as features or parameters.
If you would like to cite the tool alone, you can cite:
Wood TA and McNair D. Clinical Trial Risk Tool: software application using natural language processing to identify the risk of trial uninformativeness. Gates Open Res 2023, 7:56 doi: 10.12688/gatesopenres.14416.1.
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
@article{Wood_2023,
doi = {10.12688/gatesopenres.14416.1},
url = {https://doi.org/10.12688%2Fgatesopenres.14416.1},
year = 2023,
month = {apr},
publisher = {F1000 Research Ltd},
volume = {7},
pages = {56},
author = {Thomas A Wood and Douglas McNair},
title = {Clinical Trial Risk Tool: software application using natural language processing to identify the risk of trial uninformativeness},
journal = {Gates Open Research}
}
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Understand your clinical trials Are your clinical trials risky? Are costs running away? It’s very tricky to estimate clinical trial costs before a trial is run. Try our free cost calculator. This is a regression model, trained on real clinical trial data. Trial is for condition HIV Tuberculosis COVID Influenza Malaria Enteric and diarrheal diseases Neglected tropical diseases Polio Diabetes Pneumonia Hypertension (see full product) Motor neurone disease (see full product) Multiple sclerosis (see full product) Obesity (see full product) Sickle cell anemia (see full product) Stroke (see full product) Cystic fibrosis (see full product) Cancer (see full product) Other (see full product) Phase Early Phase 1 1 1.
This month, I presented the Clinical Trial Risk Tool at the Plotly Dash in Action webinar. I was interviewed by Plotly’s Community Manager Adam Schroeder. You can watch the relevant part of the webinar below. The Clinical Trial Risk Tool was one of four interactive apps presented as part of the webinar. The speakers at the webinar were: Matteo Trachsel, Head of Sustainability at Thermoplan AG, Switzerland, who presented his Product Environmental Report Dash App, which calculates the carbon footprint of coffee machine usage.
Natural language processing is becoming ever more important in research. The explosion in interest in LLMs is sparking many opportunities to analyse text data in healthcare, social sciences, and other areas. We’re proud to announce that the Clinical Trial Risk Tool has been selected as a winner of the Plotly Dash Example Apps Challenge (2023), out of 25 amazing apps submitted by the community. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, this app uses natural language processing, Plotly Dash, and the spaCy and Scikit-Learn libraries to calculate the risk of a clinical trial failing to deliver informative results.