Mark Lee helped co-found N-Power Medicine because he’s been on both the research and the routine care side of oncology, and knows just how inefficient they can be. A medical oncologist by training and the former global head for personalised healthcare and product development at Roche’s Genentech unit, he set out to create a platform that merges the two disparate halves into one cohesive, streamlined ecosystem.“We don’t accept this status quo where these are separate systems. Why aren’t all cancer patients also clinical research patients?” Lee told FirstWord. “And so we're challenging that status quo by saying, how do you build a model where research is an integral part of routine care delivery?” Lee serves as CEO of the company, which emerged Monday with $72 million in funding and a partnership with Merck & Co. to integrate several of the pharma’s lung cancer trials into the N-Power Medicine Network. Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund also led the initial close of the firm’s series B, the details of which were undisclosed.Administrative reliefBy weaving clinical research into everyday patient care, N-Power aims to accelerate cancer drug development, which is often hampered by inefficiencies with trial enrollment – that, in turn, is only exacerbated by how time- and resource-intensive it can be for oncologists to participate in research programmes. The average oncologist works about 58 hours per week, of which 18 hours are spent on documentation, Lee said. Adding clinical research on top of the day-to-day care they provide would add more hours to their workweek, and could require additional funds to hire the proper staff and build the right infrastructure. “It's not a surprise that the vast majority of doctors don't do clinical research,” he said. “The problem is a systemic one. It’s not going to be fixed by an app or a new AI model that helps you find patients.”To make it easier for physicians to participate in clinical research, N-Power aims to ease their administrative workload. The company’s AI-powered platform gathers a patient’s data before their appointment – synthesising radiology, pathology, labwork and doctor’s notes – so all the information is available in one place. After the visit, a clinical note is then generated for electronic health records. N-Power also provides additional manpower to take over some of the day-to-day tasks that can strain care centres. The company’s nursing staff collects patient reported data and biospecimens, and also helps walk patients through the consent process to join its Kaleido Registry. Demystifying enrollment The real-time patient registry is the lynchpin in N-Power’s strategy to simplify trial enrollment and overlay research on top of routine care.First, Kaleido aims to standardise data collection, Lee said. After a patient consents to be included in the registry, the programme provides a guide to clinicians for what data to collect, when to collect it, and how. Even if a patient decides not to participate in a clinical trial, they are still contributing to observational data collection – which, five to 10 years down the line, could help eliminate the need for control arms, he speculated.So far, about 7500 patients have joined the registry, which boasts a consent rate of 93%.Additionally, Kaleido not only helps match patients to experimental cancer drug trials, collecting and analysing that patient data can help peel back the curtain on what factors influence participation in a clinical study – an opportunity that particularly intrigued Merck, Lee said. Patient yield in studies often ends up being smaller than what researchers expect it to be, he added. But currently, trial enrollment is a “black box” because “we have no data to understand the true eligible universe of patients,” Lee explained.The data for why or why not a doctor informs certain patients about a trial, as well as why or why not a patient chooses to join a trial, is not systematically collected. Kaleido gathers all those layers of data so researchers can “begin to unpack what matters and what doesn’t matter in terms of getting people into these studies and accelerating those trials,” Lee said.Under way with MerckN-Power has already integrated two of Merck’s lung cancer trials into its network, but before beginning the work on the research side, the company first started to collect data on routine care for the disease. “We’ve been running the data model in real time in lung cancer across our network [of cancer centres] for the last 10 months, generating data every day,” Lee said. “We’ve now accumulated more than 25,000 clinical nodes… and we’re maintaining a population of about a thousand lung cancer patients.” The feedback from doctors has been uniformly positive, he added. Now with Merck onboard, N-Power can apply the data from Kaleido to see every patient eligible for the pharma’s trials, and the partners can also begin unpacking the enrollment “black box” to better understand doctor and patient behaviour. “We're generating this data now and beginning to understand the process,” Lee commented.
