Syneos Health & Haystack Health Partner to Accelerate Clinical Trials With AI

Syneos Health recently announced a strategic partnership with Haystack Health, a Roivant Health portfolio company developing advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions, to improve the identification and enrollment of patients for clinical trials.

The combined capabilities of Syneos Health and Haystack Health will more effectively and efficiently identify and match clinical trial opportunities for patients. For sponsors and sites, this partnership will deliver valuable research tools and workflow efficiencies that result in improved timelines and increased patient recruitment. Initially, these new data solutions will only be available for Syneos Health sites in the US, with a focus on oncology and immunology. Later this year, the partnership plans to expand to include additional therapeutic areas and sites across the globe.

Syneos Health and Haystack Health have been collaborating directly with sites and sponsors over several months. Via these pilot efforts, the companies have been able to identify eligible patients for specific trials in near-real time, facilitating rapid patient engagement and accelerated enrollment for hard-to-enroll trials in advanced cancers, complex auto-immune conditions, and progressive diseases, among other therapeutic areas. The companies’ combined capabilities help improve recruitment strategy to focus on patients who are less likely to fail trial screeners, thereby reducing the burden on patients, trials and sites.

“The challenges of enrolling patients in clinical trials are well documented. Protocol complexity and specificity in precision medicine have made patient recruitment even more difficult. Haystack Health offers an advanced solution leveraging AI to match patients to trials while preserving privacy,” said Baba Shetty, President, Technology & Data Solutions, Syneos Health. “We’re thrilled to be working closely alongside the Haystack Health team to innovate in this critical area for patients, sponsors and science.”

“We are very excited to be partnering with Syneos Health and its customers. At Haystack, our goal is to reduce the screen failure rate through the use of clinical AI and pre-screening services. Screen failure is extremely costly across the clinical research chain, in terms of both time and money. For overburdened and busy research sites, additional time spent on screening patients who never actually enroll into a trial could have been much more effectively spent on patient care. Clearly, better pre-screening methodologies are urgently needed to reduce screen failure rates, enabling faster clinical development and improved patient care,” added Steve Whitehurst, CEO, Haystack Health. “By more thoroughly validating study inclusion/exclusion criteria during pre-screening, the chances of pushing an ineligible patient to final screening are significantly reduced. Our industry-leading clinical NLP enables key insights to be rapidly derived from unstructured data in medical records, delivering high-quality patient matches to a study in unprecedented time.”

Syneos Health (Nasdaq:SYNH) is the only fully integrated biopharmaceutical solutions organization built to accelerate customer success. We translate unique clinical, medical affairs and commercial insights into outcomes to address modern market realities.

We bring together a talented team of professionals, who work across more than 110 countries, with a deep understanding of patient and physician behaviors and market dynamics.  Together we share insights, use the latest technologies and apply advanced business practices to speed our customers’ delivery of important therapies to patients.

Syneos Health supports a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture that cares for colleagues, customers, patients, communities and the environment. For more information, visit syneoshealth.com.

Haystack Health was founded on the observation that the current set of recruitment tools available to researchers are too limited for modern clinical trials. As study protocols grow more complex, legacy solutions built on structured medical record data or digital marketing strategies have become increasingly inadequate for identifying truly eligible patients. Unstructured records, such as clinical notes and pathology reports, are the key – but remain unsearchable in the EMR.

Haystack changes the patient enrollment paradigm by using AI and NLP to unlock critical eligibility insights from patient records, and automatically match patients to trials. This trial matching technology is provided to sites via a HIPAA-compliant workflow application, enabling clinical research teams to precisely identify eligible candidates for their studies in near real-time.