Consensus recommendations for improving the cancer clinical trial matching environment.

Abstract

Enrollment in cancer clinical trials cannot occur without first successfully identifying trials for which patients are a match based on their clinical characteristics. A lack of onsite matching trials has been identified as the single largest barrier preventing patients from participating in clinical trials. The site-agnostic cancer clinical trial matching environment is a mix of public and private tools and infrastructure that are not designed to work together to facilitate trial matching in an efficient manner. To identify policy and infrastructure solutions that could enable more effective and more frequent use of third-party site-agnostic matching, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network held a summit to examine challenges and propose consensus recommendations that could address those challenges. At this 2019 summit, stakeholders in this field examined these barriers and challenges and made a number of policy and infrastructure recommendations to improve the ability of this environment to work in a more coordinated and efficient manner.