Dana-Farber’s MatchMiner wins Harvard Business School’s Precision Trials Challenge

Harvard Business School (HBS) announced today that MatchMiner, an open computational platform developed at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for matching patient-specific genomic profiles to precision cancer medicine clinical trials, has been named the winner of the Precision Trials Challenge.

The MatchMiner platform aims to accelerate enrollment in precision medicine clinical trials and maximize clinical trial options for all patients. It is currently being developed in two distinct stages at Dana-Farber, after which point the entire platform will be made fully open source, and available to other institutions.The first stage of the platform is focused on “trial-centric” matching, enabling clinical trial investigators to create individualized genomic filters, and use these filters to forecast clinical trial enrollment, retrospectively identify new patients for clinical trials, and receive alerts of newly sequenced patients matching specific genomic criteria.The second stage of the platform is focused on “patient-centric” matching, enabling any clinician to view matching clinical trials for their specific patient, based on genomic eligibility and real-time clinical trial enrollment slot availability. Stage 1 is now live at Dana-Farber and is currently being used by multiple clinical trial teams.

The Precision Trials Challenge (openforum.hbs.org/challenge/precision-medicine/brief) is an online competition to generate ideas on how to bring precision diagnostics and therapies to market faster by reinventing the clinical trials process.

“It was exciting to read the depth and breadth of all the applications,” said Professor Robert Huckman, Faculty Chair, HBS Health Care Initiative. “It was crystal clear that using precision medicine protocols can reinvent the clinical trials process. “MatchMiner’s idea to collect patient-specific genomic data on all patients at the outset of treatment will enable them to identify the right clinical trials at the right time. MatchMiner is in beta test and is an innovative, scalable and viable approach to connecting patients to the best therapies,” he added.

A panel of judges comprised of clinical trials experts, precision medicine leaders, and influencers in biopharma, medical, science and academic fields provided expertise throughout the selection process. MatchMiner will receive the $50,000 first prize and an opportunity to share their winning idea at the annual Personalized Medicine Conference (PMC) at Harvard Medical School, where the ideation challenge was first announced last year. Two runners-up were awarded $25,000 each for their innovative ideas.

The Precision Trials Challenge was led by Harvard Business School and key members of the Personalized Medicine Conference Organizing Committee including Edward Abrahams, president of the Personalized Medicine Coalition and Raju Kucherlapti, the Paul C. Cabot Professor of Genetics, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.