Harvard Business School (HBS) announced on the 20th of May 2016, that Dana-Farber's MatchMiner has been named the winner of the Precision Trials Challenge.
A joint developmental effort between Dana-Farber’s KSG group, located in Boston, headed by Ethan Cerami PhD, and The Hyve, also located in Boston, has resulted in the inception of MatchMiner, an open computational platform for matching patient-specific genomic profiles to precision cancer medicine clinical trials.
The MatchMiner platform aims to accelerate enrollment in precision medicine clinical trials and maximize clinical trial options for all patients. It is currently being developed in two distinct stages at Dana-Farber, after which point the entire platform will be made fully open source, and available to other institutions. The first stage of the platform is focused on “trial-centric” matching, enabling clinical trial investigators to create individualized genomic filters, and use these filters to forecast clinical trial enrollment, retrospectively identify new patients for clinical trials, and receive alerts of newly sequenced patients matching specific genomic criteria. The second stage of the platform is focused on “patient-centric” matching, enabling any clinician to view matching clinical trials for their specific patient, based on genomic eligibility and real-time clinical trial enrollment slot availability. Stage 1 is now live at Dana-Farber and is currently being used by multiple clinical trial teams.
MatchMiner will receive the $50,000 first prize and an opportunity to share their winning idea at the annual Personalized Medicine Conference (PMC) at Harvard Medical School, where the ideation challenge was first announced last year. Two runners-up were awarded $25,000 each for their innovative ideas.
The Hyve has facilitated the development of the user interface whereas the group of Ethan Cerami PhD was responsible for the development of the core backend, the API and the curating of the data consumed by the MatchMiner platform.
