William Oh, MD, on Real-World Applications of AI in Clinical Trials

Although most common uses for AI revolve around time savings, when it comes to clinical trials, that likely won’t be the case. Instead, AI will play a key role in helping drive up the success rates of these trials—arguably the more critical endpoint.

During a panel discussion at the recent Precision Medicine World Conference, William K. Oh, MD, medical oncologist and director, Precision Medicine at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital, moderated a discussion among a group of clinicians and data scientists who weighed on how AI may impact clinical trials.

In an interview with BioPharm International, Oh summarized the discussion, noting that speed to completion is not likely to be the benefit that we see from incorporating AI into the clinical trial process. Instead, AI will likely help identify better patient-trial matches, ensuring that clinicians are selecting patients who are most likely to align with and benefit from the given investigational treatment.

“That is a way in which cancer treatment will become better because we accelerate the rate at which patients go on the right clinical trial matched to them, and that's a good space where LLMs [large language models] and AI tools will actually help,” Oh said.