BETTER REGULATIONS ON THE USE OF AI
Observers said technology can help to tackle the challenges of clinical trials by reducing the costs, identifying the patients who may benefit from a new drug, and shortening the timeline for drug approval.
“The key challenge is in recruitment of the patients,” said Prof Chng, who is also the executive director of the Singapore Translational Cancer Consortium.
“With AI (and) with digital platforms, you could feed in a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the AI that is linked to the hospital system will immediately identify the list of patients that may be eligible for your trial.
“So you don’t need to look for a needle in the haystack. You immediately know who are the people you should approach, and that should speed up recruitment.”
Technology such as AI can also speed up the time needed to see results in clinical trials.
Instead of a long study that takes years, the duration could be truncated to “a much shorter period of time”, said Prof Chng.
However, the World Health Organization has called for better regulations on the use of AI in the healthcare sector, over concerns of privacy, unethical data collection, cybersecurity threats and misinformation.
Prof Chng said this is something that healthcare organisations are mindful of.
“For us, when we talk about data, it’s all anonymised data,” he noted.
“So it is all within the data security of a hospital system. And none of these data actually goes out to third parties, where the risk may be higher.”