Viz.ai puts AI to work on NIH brain injury trial

Viz.ai brings its Viz Recruit software to the partnership, which the company states is able to accelerate clinical trial enrollment 200%.

The software will be focused on aiding recruitment for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Biomarker and Edema Attenuation in IntraCerebral Hemorrhage (BEACH) study.

The study is examining MW189 as a potential therapeutic for intracerebral hemorrhage, and the AI software is tasked with identifying patients at trial-eligible hospitals.

In terms of how the AI software works, Viz.ai outlined that the cloud-based technology finds eligible patients by scanning patient images in real-time, allowing for automatic identification of potential study subject with notifications sent to research teams.

The technology can use customized disease detection based on the clients’ inclusion and exclusion criteria to pre-screen eligible candidates. Once an eligible candidate is discovered, an alert can be sent to mobile and desktop platforms, with Viz.ai stating that 100% of such alerts are viewed by research teams, with 50% read within the first 10 minutes.

Viz Recruit is currently applicable to neurological, cardiac, and vascular conditions, and the company plans to expand this into other disease areas. Viz.ai states that the technology can help to improve diversity of trials by broadening the recruitment funnel to identify existing patients in its database that are trial-eligible.

Daniel Hanley, co-principal investigator of the BEACH trial at Johns Hopkins University, said, “Success for the development of novel treatments like this is dependent upon increased enrollment in clinical trials, which in turn opens the door for larger trials of MW189 in acute CNS injury and age-related dementias.”

MW189 is a small molecule therapy that selectively attenuates injury- and disease-induced pro-inflammatory cytokine overproduction in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage. There are currently no approved treatments for the condition, which often results in high rates of mortality and long-term disability.

The trial is a Phase IIa, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, with an aim to enroll 120 participants across 10 sites within the US.

Beyond intracerebral hemorrhage, MW189 is also being explored as a potential therapeutic for traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, rheumatoid arthritis, and neuropathic pain.

As recruitment issues continue to plague the industry, Johns Hopkins and Viz.ai are not the only organizations looking to harness the potential of AI. Syneos and Haystack recently signed their own agreement to use AI to speed up clinical trial recently​, with the latter company suggesting its services both speed up the recruitment process and reduce the labor required to successfully complete recruitment.