Verana Health unveils tool to improve design of ophthalmology clinical trials

Verana Health on Thursday launched VeraSite, a subscription-based tool for identifying potential ophthalmology clinical trial sites. Drawing on electronic health record data from the American Academy of Ophthalmology IRIS registry, the solution provides clinical trial sponsors and contract research organisations (CROs) with a "real-time summary of real-world ophthalmology patient populations," the company said.

"Globally, more than 80% of trials fail to meet enrolment deadlines, resulting in costly extensions, addition of new study sites or outright study failure," chief product officer Andrea Sim explained. She said the tool is an "enormous step forward in improving efficiency and diversity in ophthalmology clinical trials, and it opens up tremendous new opportunities for clinicians and patients to become more involved in clinical trials."

Verana said the tool can guide site selection and connect sponsors and CROs directly with practices that agree to have their contact information displayed, allowing researchers to gauge interest in participating in, or referring patients to, a trial. The company can also reach out to consenting practices on the sponsor's behalf, expanding access to new patient populations.

Real-world patient data

Users are offered additional site-level information, such as trial experience, sub-specialties and clinical areas of interest to match investigators to upcoming trials. The company said VeraSite provides a detailed view of the entire ophthalmology patient population, enabling sponsors and CROs to design a site strategy based on real-world patient data. Specifically, they can use parameters such as diagnoses, patterns of treatment, visual acuity results, intraocular pressure and demographics to identify different patient groups in minutes.

Verana is the exclusive data curation and analytics partner for the IRIS registry, which contains longitudinal patient data collected from over 15,000 contributing clinicians. The company uses artificial intelligence to extract and organise structured data, such as diagnosis and procedural codes, as well as unstructured data, including clinician notes and images, from the dataset.

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