The dating-style matchmaker that pairs patients with cutting-edge trials

The process couldn’t be simpler — you enter your name, date of birth, a few key characteristics about yourself and then wait for interested parties to click on your profile.

But this is not internet dating. Instead, it’s a new way of recruiting people to clinical trials that promises to speed up the development of life- saving medicines, potentially slashing the time it takes to get new drugs on to the market and transforming the way medical research is carried out.

While this digital matchmaking process doesn’t bring the prospect of romance, it does offer the possibility of a potential new treatment for those who fit the bill.

Would-be volunteers (i.e. patients) looking to ‘connect’ with researchers working on the front line of medical science voluntarily supply their details — including a medical history, or in some cases a saliva or blood sample to collect their DNA. They then wait to see if anyone responds.

Researchers from any field developing new drugs and treatments search these databases for suitable partners: several such matchmaking services are already under way.

‘There are major benefits to these kind of matchmaking services,’ says John O’Brien, a professor of old age psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and national speciality lead for dementia at the National Institute for health and Care Research (NIhR), an organisation that runs one such service.

This speeds up patient recruitment — and the whole trial process, he says. ‘Patients who use it can see online what trials are available to them, while researchers can also approach them directly to see if they’re interested,’ he adds. ‘This means your chances of joining a trial no longer depend solely on whether a doctor or nurse happens to mention it to you during a clinic appointment.’

Globally, there are about 60,000 clinical trials recruiting volunteers at any one time.

But recruitment is a costly and time- consuming process, which mostly relies on doctors nominating individual patients (who may have failed to respond to existing treatments) for trials that happen to be taking place at the hospital or NhS trust where they work.

Another method is for researchers to ask medical teams to trawl through their patient records to identify suitable recruits — a task they must try and squeeze into their already-packed schedules.

This slow process is a key reason that an estimated 80 per cent of trials struggle to recruit the right number of patients on time — more than 50 per cent of trials that fail to complete do so because they cannot recruit enough volunteers. This is thought to be one of the reasons why drug development can take ten to 15 years.

Clinical trial matchmaking, based on a computer algorithm, makes it easier for researchers and patients to find each other. One of the first of these initiatives in the UK was Join Dementia Research — a project which began in 2015 with the backing of the

NIhR and several Alzheimer’s charities. Patients interested in taking part in trials simply register their details — name, age and sex and any medical complaints — and then receive email updates on appropriate new dementia trials in their area. Alternatively, carers can nominate a relative.

OVER the past seven years, nearly 68,000 people from across the UK have joined trials after registering their details with Join Dementia Research. And more than 2,000 researchers use it to search for drug trial candidates.

This level of recruitment means the database has ‘already made a tremendous contribution to research,’ says Professor O’Brien.

Other initiatives are in the pipeline to extend matchmaking to other disease areas.

Cambridge-based start-up company Sano Genetics is one firm using the online dating model to bring researchers and volunteers together over 50 different disease categories — from long Covid and multiple sclerosis to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

volunteers for the Sano Genetics service pay nothing but are sent an at-home DNA saliva test to complete and send back to the company.

This genetic profile and medical history is then used to link patients with drug companies running studies on personalised medicine — where drug and treatment regimens are tailored to each individual patient, based on their genetic profile, rather than dishing out the same doses of drugs to everyone.

Drug companies pay Sano Genetics a subscription fee for the service in return for access to study volunteers with a potentially better genetic profile — trials are therefore more likely to produce speedier and more accurate results.

Rival firm Akkure, based in Dublin, has developed a Digital Twin service — which also uses volunteers’ DNA to match them up (‘within minutes’, it claims) with suitable clinical trials in their own locality.

‘Matchmaking is a way of making sure many more patients get the opportunity to join a trial that is right for them,’ says Professor O’Brien. ‘At the moment, they might be lucky enough to hear about studies when they go to hospital. Yet if they went to a different hospital in the same area, they might never know about them.’