Ron DePinho, Professor of Department of Cancer Biology, Division of Discovery Science at MD Anderson Cancer Center, shared on LinkedIn:
“LOST IN TRANSLATION … and how AI can help.
Scientific breakthroughs in oncology are accelerating, but our clinical-trial infrastructure remains stuck in the past. Promising therapies are slowed by cumbersome protocol development, delayed site activation, fragmented data systems, inefficient patient identification, and trials that struggle to enroll. For patients with cancer, these are not administrative inconveniences. Time lost in translation can mean lives lost.
AI offers an extraordinary opportunity to redesign the clinical-trial enterprise … from protocol development and feasibility assessment to patient matching, site selection, real-time safety monitoring, data capture, endpoint evaluation, and regulatory submission. AI could help identify eligible patients wherever they receive care, reduce unnecessary exclusions, anticipate enrollment barriers, automate routine documentation, and allow investigators to learn from emerging data without compromising scientific rigor or patient safety.
Solution: A national AI Clinical Trials Moonshot that brings together patients, academic medical centers, community practices, government, technology companies, and biopharma around a shared goal: Cut the time and cost required to test promising therapies while expanding access and preserving the highest standards of evidence.
This will require interoperable data, rigorous validation, transparency, privacy protection, regulatory modernization, and equitable deployment. AI must augment and not replace the judgment of physicians, investigators, regulators, and patients.
America has invested enormously in science and discovering new medicines. We should now make an equally ambitious investment in the system that delivers those discoveries to patients. No Nature paper has ever cured a patient … knowledge needs to be converted into a new drug to make an impact.
The next medical moonshot may not be a single drug. It may be a clinical-trial infrastructure capable of moving every effective treatment to patients MUCH faster.”