Open-source AI speeds up patient-matching for clinical trials

The doctor will see you right now…

The healthcare industry has long struggled with efficiently matching patients to clinical trials, with traditional methods taking hundreds of days and resulting in 80% of trials missing enrollment targets. Mendel AI, a clinical AI platform, is addressing this challenge by combining open source AI models with specialized healthcare technology to reduce matching time to just one day.

The innovation breakthrough: Mendel AI’s Hypercube platform integrates Meta’s open source Llama model with a clinical hypergraph to revolutionize patient matching and clinical trial management.

• The platform enables healthcare companies to organize data on their own cloud infrastructure, creating a secure and searchable knowledge base
• Hypercube supports natural language querying for trial matching and patient cohort analysis
• The system handles complex clinical tasks including data abstraction and chart reviews

Technical implementation: Mendel AI has developed a sophisticated approach to customizing open source AI for healthcare applications.

• The company began by fine-tuning Llama 2 to create a natural language interface for their knowledge base inference engine
• Engineers continuously pre-trained both 8B and 70B parameter versions of Llama 3 to develop healthcare-specific foundation models
• The resulting system combines lightweight models with instruction-following and in-context learning capabilities in an agentic framework

Strategic advantages: The use of open source AI models provides significant benefits for companies operating in regulated industries like healthcare.

• Organizations can create customized AI solutions without sharing sensitive data with model providers
• The approach eliminates substantial upfront costs associated with proprietary AI systems
• Companies can focus resources on developing industry-specific applications rather than basic AI infrastructure

Expert perspective: Dr. Wael Salloum, Mendel’s Founder and Chief Science Officer, emphasizes the transformative potential of their approach.

• The platform enables rapid innovation by allowing companies to focus on specific use cases
• Open source models democratize access to advanced AI capabilities for startups
• Mendel AI plans to incorporate the multimodal Llama 3.2 model in future developments

Future implications: The successful implementation of open source AI in clinical trial matching could mark a turning point in healthcare innovation, though questions remain about scalability and regulatory compliance across different healthcare systems and jurisdictions.