The University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School will serve as the key academic partner on two contracts from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health aimed at modernizing clinical trials and making participation more accessible to patients.
The projects, STACK and COMMONS, complement ARPA-H’s SURPASS program, which is focused on changing how clinical trials are designed and conducted.
Evidence Health, a company developing consent and governance infrastructure for healthcare and research, is leading the two contracts. Dell Medical School will help develop and validate the programs using expertise across UT in computing, engineering, data science and other disciplines.
STACK is designed to increase the number of healthcare sites capable of conducting clinical trials while helping patients find research opportunities closer to home.
The project will combine reusable contracting frameworks, community health workers and technologies intended to make different health data systems interoperable.
Its design also takes into account practical obstacles to trial participation, including transportation, caregiver obligations, work schedules and limitations in individual research sites’ capacity.
COMMONS will focus on creating a national research data resource governed by patient and institutional permissions.
Dell Medical School will serve as the initial contributing site and will help test the framework for bringing different data sources into a common format while enforcing permissions governing how information can be used.
Researchers will evaluate whether analyses using the resource can reproduce established findings and reliably identify patients who may qualify for clinical trials.
The projects align with UT’s broader plans for the UT Dell Medical Center and its strategy of integrating research more closely with routine patient care.
KEY QUOTES:
“The promise of UT Dell Medical Center is to improve lives by building care around the people we serve. That means bringing research closer to patients and making learning part of everyday care. These projects will help build a lasting foundation for that work by connecting patients with appropriate trials, bringing participation closer to home, and using real-world and digital data to better understand what works and for whom. Scientific rigor and patient protections must guide every step, so patients and clinicians can have confidence in the findings that inform their decisions.”
Claudia Lucchinetti, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs at UT Austin and Dean of Dell Medical School
“Better infrastructure can help clinical trials move faster while upholding rigorous scientific standards. By making it easier to launch studies, connect patients with opportunities and use data effectively, we can help research teams generate evidence more efficiently.”
Nilay Shah, Chief Strategy Officer at Dell Medical School
