In an article published in Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research, an international collaboration of data scientists and pharmaceutical industry experts – led by the Director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine, Professor Mihaela van der Schaar of the University of Cambridge – describes the impact that COVID-19 is having on clinical trials, and reveals how the latest machine learning (ML) approaches can help to overcome challenges that the pandemic presents.
The paper covers three areas of clinical trials in which ML can make contributions: in trials for repurposing drugs to treat COVID-19, trials for new drugs to treat COVID-19, and ongoing clinical trials for drugs unrelated to COVID-19.
The team, which includes scientists from pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, notes that ‘the pandemic provides an opportunity to apply novel approaches that can be used in this challenging situation.’ They highlight the latest advances in reinforcement learning, causal inference and Bayesian approaches applied to clinical trial data.
The researchers considered it important to present the current state of the art in ML and to signpost how they used ML not only to address challenges presented by COVID-19 but also to take clinical trials in general to the next level, making them more efficient, robust and flexible.
Image: Coronavirus
Credit: Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge