Developed by Professor Dean Ho and his team, CURATE.AI is an optimisation platform that harnesses a patient’s clinical data, which includes drug type, drug dose and cancer biomarkers, to generate an individualised digital profile which is used to customise the optimal dose during the course of chemotherapy treatment.
“Chemotherapy treatment is often given at fixed doses, based on certain patient parameters. However, these toxicity-guided doses may not result in optimal response to treatment. Using CURATE.AI, which is efficacy-driven, we hope to help doctors to quickly identify the optimal doses that are customised for each patient at different stages of the treatment cycle. The ultimate goal is to improve patient and treatment outcomes,” explained Prof Ho, who heads the Department of Biomedical Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (CDE) and is a co-corresponding author of the study. He is also the Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) under the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) and the N.1 Institute for Health (N.1) at NUS.
He added, “The aim of CURATE.AI is to potentially find more responders to treatment, and also find the right doses for patients that can optimise efficacy and/or prolong the period the patient is responsive to the treatment. For some patients, these doses may potentially be lower than the high doses that are traditionally used.”
“An important aspect of applying AI in medicine is the direct involvement of clinicians in building individualised datasets. The pilot trial represents a promising step towards incorporating CURATE.AI into the clinical workflow of dynamic dose selection in the treatment of solid tumours. A key aim of CURATE.AI is to enable truly personalised dosing for patients while also empowering clinicians to identify the optimal dose for each patient, without adding to their workload. In this way, clinicians can focus more on the patient and the caregiver,” said Dr Raghav Sundar, Principal Investigator of the PRECISE.CURATE clinical trial, and Consultant at the Department of Haematology-Oncology, NCIS.
CURATE.AI uses a small data approach to calibrate each patient’s drug dosage using his/her own clinical data. Each patient is given varied doses of a drug and his/her responses to these varied doses are measured. This data, together with other relevant clinical data, are then used to construct a digital profile for each patient. By relating the drug dosing to treatment efficacy and safety, CURATE.AI selects the right doses to optimise treatment outcomes for each digital profile. During the course of treatment, the dose may evolve over time.
During the pilot trial, which was conducted from August 2020 to April 2022 at the National University Hospital, clinicians were permitted to accept or reject CURATE.AI dose recommendations based on clinical judgement.
“We are very encouraged by the results of the pilot trial. We’ve observed an average reduction of chemotherapy doses by around 20%, and 96.7% of the dose recommendations by CURATE.AI were accepted by clinicians,” said Dr Agata BIasiak, the presenting author and co-corresponding author of the study.
“Other outcomes of the study demonstrated 80% patient adherence to the recommended doses, and 100% compliance in providing dosing recommendations within the required timeframe. These early results serve as an optimistic step forward towards downstream implementation of CURATE.AI into clinical practice,” added Dr Blasiak, who is also from CDE, WisDM and N.1 at NUS.
MEDICA-tradefair.com; Source: National University of Singapore
