AI-Powered Patient Prescreening Tool Revolutionizes Clinical Trial Enrollment

Health tech company Inato has unveiled an innovative AI-powered patient prescreening tool designed to streamline and accelerate the clinical trial enrollment process. This development comes at a crucial time for the pharmaceutical industry, as patient enrollment continues to be a significant bottleneck in clinical trials.

Addressing the Enrollment Challenge

Patient enrollment in clinical trials has become increasingly challenging, with the prescreening process taking 25% longer today compared to five years ago. This slowdown is attributed to growing trial complexity, larger trials, and increased competition for participants. Inato's new AI technology aims to tackle this issue head-on by significantly reducing the time and effort required to assess patient eligibility for clinical trial opportunities.

Kourosh Davarpanah, co-founder and CEO of Inato, emphasized the importance of this development: "Recent advances in AI reasoning enable sites to identify and review patients at scale–fundamentally changing how they approach this challenge. Sites can now focus their efforts on offering more trial options to more patients, accelerating enrollment timelines while enhancing access to research."

AI Technology in Action

The newly launched AI agent offers several key features that promise to revolutionize the prescreening process:

1. De-identification of patient records
2. Rapid determination of relevant trials for each patient
3. Evaluation of patients against inclusion and exclusion criteria
4. Compliance with HIPAA guidelines

Inato reports that their AI tool can assess patients in just minutes with a 95% accuracy rate, allowing site staff to make quick, informed decisions about eligibility. Early users have reported reductions in prescreening times by more than 50% and up to 90%.

The technology utilizes a blend of models capable of sophisticated medical reasoning, deduction, time-bound assessments, and handwriting understanding. This combination allows for complex evaluations, such as assessing a patient's history of seizures against specific trial criteria, to be completed quickly and accurately.

Impact on the Clinical Trial Landscape

Inato's platform now boasts over 5,000 community research sites across more than 70 countries and partnerships with 20 of the top 40 pharmaceutical companies. The introduction of this AI tool is expected to have far-reaching effects on the clinical trial landscape.

Davarpanah highlighted the potential impact on patient care: "This fundamentally changes the experience for patients. As a patient, instead of being prescreened for one trial when the site is trying to enroll patients specifically for this trial, what the tool allows is, once you're uploaded into the tool, you will be prescreened across all the trials that are available at the site. If you're not eligible for this one, you might actually be eligible for a much better one for you."

The company continues to expand its AI capabilities, collaborating with organizations like Pantheon Clinical Research to explore areas such as feasibility. With $20 million in series A2 funding secured in 2023, Inato is well-positioned to drive further innovation in the clinical trial space.

As the pharmaceutical industry increasingly turns to AI solutions, Inato's prescreening tool represents a significant step forward in addressing one of the most persistent challenges in drug development. By reducing the time and resources required for patient enrollment, this technology has the potential to accelerate the overall pace of clinical research and bring new treatments to patients more quickly.