Exigent Research has signed major multi-year partnership with ConcertAI to ensure potentially lifesaving clinical trials are available to the broadest population of patients possible, combining the growing Exigent community oncology research network with a full suite of ConcertAI technologies providing study feasibility, patient-to-trial matching, and AI-powered study automation.

The technology suite will be tailored and fully integrated to all Exigent sites and all EMRs and powered by the CARAai™ platform. In June of 2024, ConcertAI announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to advance technologies optimized for oncology clinical development, leveraging NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform for developing and deploying production-grade, end-to-end agentic AI pipelines.

The approach allows for critical unstructured data to be processed adjacent to electronic medical records (EMRs) in near real time by a series of large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI solutions to help ensure the latest patient information is available to site research teams. 

“Oncology trials are complex, involving 40, 50, sometimes 70 levels of inclusion and exclusion criteria, many associated with evidence of disease progression and specific biomarker statuses,” said Jeff Elton, PhD, CEO of ConcertAI. 

“Assessing these data requires highly skilled healthcare professionals accessing multiple documents and tabs in the EMR, often requiring one to four hours per patient. The latest series of vision LLMs and NIM-deployed LLMs, with agentic AI, allow technology to augment the clinical research team with 4x productivity and no loss of precision – a true breakthrough in the model for biomedical research,” added Elton.

Exigent was formed by the community oncology network, ONCare, just over four years ago. It was founded on the premise that patients in all community settings need access to a broad set of clinical trials to ensure they have the opportunity to realize the best possible clinical outcomes. The expertise and infrastructure available at the community level has increasingly converged towards that which was once only available at large academic medical centers.

“When we established Exigent, we knew there was a gap in clinical research access that assured that trial populations looked like the standard of care populations who would receive newly approved medicines,” said Sibel Blay, MD CEO of Exigent and Co-founder of ONCare.

“Exigent is a new approach that immediately catalyzed community site and clinical trials sponsors alike. We now offer one of the largest portfolios of clinical trials of any network organization in the US,” added Blay.

In 2020, ConcertAI and ONCare incubated technologies in a novel joint research agreement. These have progressed to being some of the most broadly deployed AI-powered solutions in oncology research. The new generation being deployed as part of this partnership have the ability to access and process all data types, document types, and EMR sources in real time both for patient-to-trial matching and full-trial automation. The two areas have a defined roadmap of new capabilities for the partnership, including theranostics, CAR-T, and other novel therapies.