PONTE

Efficient Patient Recruitment for Innovative Clinical Trials of Existing Drugs to other Indications

PONTE supports the entire clinical trial process, so that it is easier to create a research hypothesis, define the protocol and select the right patients. As a result, the public has quicker access to better, safer and cheaper drugs.

Domaine: Health ⊕

Innovation theme: Cyber Security ⊕

Factsheet:

Project type: European Framework Programs
Status: Finished
Collaboration: Europe
Role: Coordinator
Started: 1 March 2010
Duration: 36 months
Program: FP7-ICT
CETIC budget: 694875 €

Project team

Objectives

PONTE is aiming to develop a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Semantics Web platform for the identification of patients for clinical trials dedicated to drug repositioning. The solution had to mitigate safety risks and improves clinical trial costs and efficiency. CETIC has contributed to standardisation, Semantic Web research and development, security, and the SOA. CETIC was also the project coordinator.

Results

The PONTE outcomes cover the clinical trial design process, as well as patient recruitment from many hospitals and the results of active investigation and implementation of security and legislative requirements for patient health. The design is supported by a semantic search engine that retrieves information from the clinical literature and from linked data (and mot 242), uses an online authoring tool capable of identifying suitable patients and provides decision support to clinical investigators.

Added value

The health and pharmaceutical industries are searching for ways to improve clinical trial design in terms of cost, time and patient safety. Semantic Web concepts, carefully integrated into applications designed in close collaboration with domain experts, are helping to improve the efficiency of clinical trial design.