UT Austin's Dell Medical School will have a key role in new projects aimed at improving and expanding clinical trials in the United States, federal officials announced Wednesday.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was joined by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz and other top health officials to unveil the new SURPASS initiative — an acronym for "Simulation-augmented, Real-time Platform Adaptive Seamless Trials." Kennedy said the goal was to modernize American clinical trial infrastructure to be able to compete with countries that are amping up medical innovation, including China and Australia.
"The system we have today takes far too long, it costs too much and it asks too much of the patients," Kennedy said.
SURPASS is funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within HHS created under the Biden administration that invests in innovative research and "breakthrough technologies." With this initiative, the agency hopes to speed up the development of new disease treatments.
"Today's clinical trial system often requires too many stops, too much duplicated infrastructure, and too much time before researchers can understand whether a trial is on the right track," said Daria Fedyukina, program manager for SURPASS, in a news release.
Dell Medical School will be the "key academic partner" for two major projects announced as part of the SURPASS initiative. The first, known as STACK, intends to equip more research sites to take on clinical trials and make them more accessible to patients where they live, including in rural areas. The second, the COMMONS project, will develop a "national research data resource" which institutions across the country can access and contribute to. In addition to sharing data useful for future clinical trials, it aims to help institutions identify patients who might be a good fit for a project. Dell Medical School will be the first institution to contribute to and test COMMONS.
Dell Medical School will dedicate resources from across UT to the efforts, including contributions from experts in computing, engineering and data science.
Claudia Lucchinetti, the dean of Dell Medical School, said the projects align with the university's goals in opening the forthcoming Dell Medical Center — "bringing research closer to patients and making learning part of everyday care."
"These projects will help build a lasting foundation for that work by connecting patients with appropriate trials, bringing participation closer to home and using real-world and digital data to better understand what works and for whom," Lucchinetti said in a news release.
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