A translational research team led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) has harnessed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that is able to successfully treat a patient with advanced cancer.
Representing a big step forward in personalised medicine, CURATE.AI is able to completely halt disease progression.
In a clinical study, the research team utilised CURATE.AI to continuously identify the optimal doses of a novel drug for a patient with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (MCRPC). This resulted in a durable response, allowing the patient to resume a completely normal and active lifestyle.
“Dynamic dosing in cancer therapy is not commonly used. In fact, drug dosing changes in oncology are typically performed only to reduce toxicity," explained Professor Dean Ho, Director of the Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE) at NUS, who led the study.
He also added that many patients do not respond drug combination because the dosages are not suitable for them. Therefore, while fixed dose combination therapy represents a standard of care, it may also serve as a barrier to realising truly optimal and personalised medicine.
On the other hand, "CURATE.AI uniquely modifies drug dosing to increase efficacy. Our clinical study has shown that dosing can profoundly affect the efficacy and safety of treatment. A patient’s clinical profile changes over time. The unique ability for CURATE.AI to rapidly identify the drug doses that result in the best possible treatment outcomes allows for actionable, and perpetually optimised personalised medicine."
The CURATE.AI platform developed by a team of engineers from NUS team uses the patient’s own clinical data – such as their drug doses and corresponding changes to tumour sizes or levels of cancer biomarkers in the blood – to calibrate his or her unique response to treatment.
This calibration is then used to create an individualised CURATE.AI profile, which identifies the drug doses which enable the best possible treatment outcome at any given point in time.
“No two patients’ profiles are alike, and as a patient’s body and the cancer itself evolve during treatment, the CURATE.AI profile evolves as well, enabling the clinical and engineering teams to optimise care for the entire duration of treatment, an unprecedented advance for combination therapy,” Prof Ho explained.