NIH develops AI tool to better pair cancer patients with drugs [Video]

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have developed an artificial intelligence tool that predicts whether a patient will respond to cancer treatment drugs using individual tumor cells, according to a study published in Nature Cancer.

Traditional approaches to drug-patient matching focus on bulk sequencing of tumor DNA and RNA. The new AI approach, named PERCEPTION, takes advantage of single-cell RNA sequencing, which provides better resolution data to fine tune predicted drug responses. 

The new approach showed promise in two clinical trials for myeloma and breast cancer. 

The study created a numerical value for the effectiveness of clinical trial drug combinations and ranked them best on individual tumor cell responses to the treatments, allowing researchers to decide the most effective treatment for a specific patient. 

THE LARGER TREND

NIH announced in October that a study it fundedfound a tablet application could be used for early screening for …