DPHARM 2024: Acclinate CEO Del Smith Highlights the Roles of Technology and Engagement in Clinical Research

ACT: You have an upcoming session on “Harnessing AI/ML to Drive Sustained Community Engagement for Diverse Clinical Trial Participation.” What will be the premise of the presentation?

Smith: Yeah, so I'll be talking about the use of AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) and sustained community engagement to help drive clinical trial participation. Really, what we're doing is we know that AI/ML is one of the hottest topics of today—this new technology that's there—and we're really leaning into this idea of coupling that technology with one of the most traditional ways that we know of having active participation from communities, and that is sustained community engagement, getting into the communities. What I will talk about is how you marry those two things together so that you have the sustained engagement that creates trust, data, and how you can take that trust in data and utilize predictive analytics and AI to help make very precise decisions about who's most likely willing and able to take part in clinical research.

ACT: What is needed to design and develop a predictive model that produces the highest potential for engagement?

Smith: It's really important when you're developing this AI/ML model for clinical trial participation to take a combination of social determinants of health data along with what we call engagement data. An example that would be SDOH data may be, simply, what is the zip code of the person that you are engaging with, and the engagement data would be something along the lines of how often or how engaged is that individual when it comes to trying to get them active in making decisions about their health. When you combine these two sources of data together, and you take it through your proper algorithms, you can get some pretty high confidence in terms of who's willing and able to take part in that particular research study.

ACT: What do you believe is needed in order to better connect with communities of color, while increasing overall diversity in clinical research?

Smith: We talk a lot about this combination of sustained engagement and technology, but I really want to emphasize that it really starts with the engagement. There's no amount of technology that's going to be created or developed that's going to instantly increase a person's level of trust in the clinical research or instantly increase their level of education or awareness or empowerment about clinical research, and that a lot of times happens on the ground. It's really, really important that whatever solution that we look at to try to increase diversity in clinical trial participation starts with and leans very heavily into some type of actual engagement with either the community or what some people call the patient themselves, but it can't just stop at that alone, because we’ve got to have something that's more scalable. We have to have something that's more predictable. We have to have something that allows us to tie to specific outcomes as it relates to being able to mobilize those people for clinical trials, and that's when the combination of sustained engagement and technology must come together.

ACT: Keeping all of this in mind, what inspired you to start Acclinate, and what challenges did you face in the midst of the pandemic?

Smith: Yeah, the seed for Acclinate was planted many, many decades ago. When I was a teen, my mom was a healthcare professional. Unfortunately, she contracted tuberculosis during home healthcare, and after about a year, she passed away unfortunately, and I discovered about three months later, there was a clinical trial going on in the area that we never knew about. I did not realize at the time how significant that experience was going to be for me, but over time and the experiences, I got to a point where I recognize that there's really only one way to keep that from being systematic and happening, and that is to do this sustained engagement work, building trust in communities, making sure that they're aware and knowledgeable about clinical trial opportunities so they can make a decision to be part of clinical research.