Frequently asked questions

Yes, we will supply all the source code to such organizations. They can modify it as they choose and truly make it their own service. Based on our discussions we believe that most such organizations will eventually choose to have CancerBot host the service for them (with their branding). CancerBot will also enhance the software for the foundation’s needs. CancerBot will then charge either a hosting fee or broker patients.

Patients can sign up for free to CancerBot directly. CancerBot makes money by brokering patients to trial researchers from for-profit pharma.

There are some open source projects, notably TrialGPT and TrialMatchAI, that present “vignettes” for synthetic patients (short paragraphs describing the patient and a handful of symptoms) and then recommend a trial from a curated dataset of trials. It then evaluates whether the top ranked trial is accurately selected and evaluates the precision of the top n trials. This is not true precision matching based on patient labs, diagnostics and biomarkers.

The accuracy results are quite marginal (in the 60% range), and reflect what the accuracy of presenting some patient info and then asking the LLM whether the trial is relevant can achieve. This is not accurate enough to be a useful system for patients. CancerBot’s EXACT system is more involved than this to get around the limitations of this naive approach.

We use AI LLMs in a complex system called EXtracting Attributes from Clinical Trials (EXACT) described here. The result is extracting specific attribute criteria from trials with very high accuracy as described here.

It is a notoriously difficult problem. Other patient centered matching services ask a few basic questions (disease, stage, grade, previous therapy) and then get a lay consultant involved in the matching process. In my interactions with these consultants they knew less about my disease than I did. This is not precision matching. 

CancerBot was created because there are no patient-centered clinical trial matching services that offer precision matching based on patient labs, diagnostics and biomarkers. Other patient-centric matching services don’t even ask the questions about those attributes that would enable such matching.