Solving Cancer Clinical Trial Information Gaps for Patients & Doctors

Solving Information Inequities between Cancer Patients, their Doctors, and Clinical Trial Sponsors” Brad Power and Victoria Dombrowski March 26, 2025 “Physicians have a lot of information in their hospital and about the trials with which they are familiar. Clinical trial sponsors know a huge amount of information about the trials that they are running.

Most patients are uninformed about all of it, and it's really hard to get access to the details that those other two parties have. ” – Mike Harris “If we can put information into the hands of the patient, they can go to their physician and say, ‘There's a trial at your hospital here, and there's another one across the city. ” - Mike Harris “We're just trying to help patients navigate clinical trials.

Pancreatic cancer patients and their caregivers struggle to find well-matched clinical trial options for their treatment. Doctors lack efficient, accurate tools to find trials for their patients – particularly beyond their own hospital. And clinical trial sponsors struggle to accelerate and diversify trial enrollment so they can bring promising new treatments to market.

Mike Harris is uniquely qualified to talk about the challenges and solutions for bridging the clinical trials information gaps between patients, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. He is a co-founder of TriCan Health, a platform to improve access to personalized information about clinical trials.

He is on the Clinical Trials Committee of the Academy of Oncology Nurse and Patient Navigators (AONN+), and is the author of two articles published in JONS and Conquer about clinical trial myths and realities. Prior to TriCan, he led the 3,000-person research team at Gartner, a $5B company that helps match technology buyers and sellers, and he’s now applying that experience to healthcare.

What are the challenges that cancer patients and their loved ones face in finding clinical trials?

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Brad Power This is the Cancer Patient Lab. This is our weekly webinar. Today we're honored to have Mike Harris of Trican Health with us. He's going to be talking about some new clinical trial matching around various cancers. They are starting in pancreatic cancer, but I'm sure he will explain that is probably just a beachhead for broader things, so you can talk about where they're going in the future.

I want to cover our standard housekeeping items. The first is that this is for medical information only. This is not medical advice. We try to arm our patients with information they can take to their medical team. The second is that everything here will be made public, we’re very open source. If you’re concerned about having your image, name, or words shared, you can change your name, image, and not verbally participate.

Finally, We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3), and we depend on the kindness of volunteers and donors. If you're inspired to donate, that's easily done through our website, where there's a Donate button, and we're always looking for volunteers. With that, I’ll turn it over to Mike. Mike Harris 1:17 I'd like to review with you what we're doing within Trican Health. You can see the URL here.

I'd like to define what we are, and what we're not, and then step through some information of what we're doing and why we're doing it. I'll also provide a demo of the sites and perhaps we have “Solving Information Inequities between Cancer Patients, their Doctors, and Clinical Trial Sponsors” someone in Kathi Peterson who's working through pancreatic cancer right now.

If she's willing, we might be able to do a live search based on her specific conditions, and give you a sense of how the platform would work. As Brad suggested, this is a specific focus right now in pancreatic cancer in the United States, but we are intending to expand to other forms of cancer as we expand the platform. Trican is a digital platform, similar to Cancer Patient Lab, in terms of providing information and insight.

Our goal is to help patients make informed decisions throughout their treatment journey. We are specifically servicing pancreatic cancer patients in the US. We have capabilities to provide navigation for clinical trials, so understanding more about clinical trials, information about the disease, how clinical trials work (and how they don't). We want to make things easy to access and understand from a clinical trial availability perspective.

This is an exceptionally knowledgeable group of patients and practitioners today. We've tried to make the platform accessible to folks who are less knowledgeable than you all and provide an access form so that people who are more knowledgeable and understand the ins and outs of trials and cancer treatments can navigate it effectively.

gov as our primary source of information, as I think you all know, that is the government registry of all trials that are occurring in the US and around the world. We augment that with supplemental information that makes it easier to understand. Because I'll tell you, I am not a medical or scientific person by background. gov to be gobbledygook compared to the normal language that I would speak.

We've tried to make it a little more accessible while still providing enough specificity that knowledgeable patients and physicians can get value from it. Honestly, that's a “Solving Information Inequities between Cancer Patients, their Doctors, and Clinical Trial Sponsors” tough balance to strike, and I'd welcome your input on whether we're hitting that or not. What we do is an unbiased approach.

I came from a company called Gartner that does technology advisory reviews. It's based in Stamford, Connecticut, and I spent a lot of time there. The premise of that company was to provide an unbiased perspective on providing a match, in that case, between people who were buying software and other forms of technology and the various providers of technology. The key was to be unbiased, impartial, and accurate.

I've taken that strategy and applied it to matching pancreatic cancer clinical trials. We're not trying to bias one trial sponsor over another, or one form of treatment over another. Rather, we want to make the best possible match based on the patient's needs, where they're physically located, their treatment history, and their particular form of cancer. Most importantly, we want to make it patient-centric. We want to make it comprehensive.

It's always free for use by patients and their physicians. We want to make it a sustainable business by charging a sponsorship fee from the trial sponsors themselves, because getting their information in front of patients who are actively considering clinical trials is very valuable for them. We're trying to make the business self-sustaining in that way. In terms of who I am, I'm on the right hand side. I was with this company called Gartner.

My background is in information technology. Frankly, the more interesting partner in this business is my wife, Kimya Harris, who, like Emma Shtivelman (at Cancer Commons), is a molecular biologist with a PhD in cellular molecular biology. She did bench research [basic research or laboratory research, link] on different forms of cancer for a portion of her career.

She was in patent law for a while, in the biotech space, and she was a biotech executive in Cambridge, “Solving Information Inequities between Cancer Patients, their Doctors, and Clinical Trial Sponsors” Massachusetts as well as Waltham, Massachusetts, for a period of time. She wanted to help patients get access to the kinds of treatments that her companies were developing and was frankly surprised at how hard that was.

These biotech and pharmaceutical companies do all this work to generate amazing new compounds and potential cures and treatments for cancer, yet it's really hard to get access to those, especially in the early stages. We discovered this while trying to help particular patients find access to clinical trials. They had a devil of a time trying to get access to them.

We realized there had to be a better way to make it more accessible, like the way you can get access to so many other bits of information from travel options to buying an automobile to shopping for auto insurance. All these simpler, less important decisions can be researched online, and yet this critically important life saving decision is really, really difficult.

We wanted to make it easier, first and foremost, for the patients, and secondly, for other users as well, like advocacy organizations and physicians. As you all know the problem for patients really comes down to trying to find information around clinical trials and also recognizing that most trials are run at academic hospitals, but only about 20% of patients are treated at academic hospitals.

If you think of the MD Andersons, the various hospitals, like here in Boston, the Mass General Brigham and so forth, excellent trials are run at these institutions, but doctors in those institutions are generally unaware of trials that are happening just down the street at another hospital. If you're in a more remote area, a rural area, there's very limited access to trial information for a particular site.

“Solving Information Inequities between Cancer Patients, their Doctors, and Clinical Trial Sponsors” We found that a lot of patients are within driving distance typically of one of these academic hospitals and there are a number of services that can get you to even further, more distant hospitals as well, but those things are rarely known about or they're hard to find. We also found a gap between clinical trial enrollment in terms of interest.