Biopharmaceutical company, Lantern Pharma, and digital healthcare company, Deep Lens have announced they have entered into a strategic partnership to use Deep Lens’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) Clinical Trial Matching solution, VIPERÔ. Through the implementation of an AI-enabled drug development pathway, Lantern will accelerate enrollment for its planned Phase 2 clinical trial of LP-300 in combination with chemotherapy for never-smokers with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
Panna Sharma, President & CEO of Lantern Pharma, stated, “The current drug development model is extremely expensive, with an estimated $2.6 billion in drug development costs for each Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drug. Moreover, based on the estimated 5.3% success rate for oncology drugs, most therapies, will fail to reach commercialization, despite showing efficacy in certain subgroups. Not only do the majority of therapies in development fail to meet safety or efficacy endpoints, but an equally large number, 75% of clinical trials, fail to meet recruitment deadlines, due in large part to enrollment challenges. It is quite apparent that cancer treatment requires a lower cost of care and an increase in the choice and efficacy of precision therapies, which we believe we can deliver through a combination of A.I., machine learning, and large-scale biomarker analytics, with a goal of ultimately crushing the cost of cancer therapy development. For this reason, we are very excited to partner with Deep Lens and create an end-to-end A.I. enabled pathway from drug rescue to patient recruitment.”
With its RADR® AI platform and machine learning, Lantern is developing oncology treatments that identify biomarker signatures that will most likely predict which patients will respond to its pipeline of therapeutics. Through Deep Lens’ AI platform, VIPER, the company’s platform is able to identify, triage, and match cancer patients with individuals who are eligible for clinical trials in real-time. These companies are working together to improve two of the most complex and time-consuming parts of drug development: matching the right drug molecule to the right indication and selecting the right patients to participate in clinical trials.
Dave Billiter, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Deep Lens said, “Precision medicine has changed the way we think about treating and identifying certain types of cancer, but it has also significantly increased the complexity of clinical trials. Trials often have very narrow eligibility criteria, making enrollment objectives difficult to meet, and unfortunately, many companies will fail to move along the development path successfully. Deep Lens leverages their A.I. platform, VIPER, and supporting services to automate the patient identification and screening process so that trials enroll faster and more efficiently. We believe that leveraging A.I. across multiple phases of drug development will decrease overall time-to-market timelines as well as associated costs. We look forward to partnering with Lantern to help them achieve their trial enrollment goals and to provide access to LP-300 to patients in need as quickly as possible.”
