Machine learning for clinical trials in the era of COVID-19

William R Zame; Ioana Bica; Cong Shen; Alicia Curth; Hyun-Suk Lee; Stuart Bailey; James Weatherall; David Wright; Frank Bretz; Mihaela van der Schaar

doi:10.1080/19466315.2020.1797867

Machine learning for clinical trials in the era of COVID-19

Stat Biopharm Res. 2020 Aug 18;12(4):506-517. doi: 10.1080/19466315.2020.1797867.

Authors

William R Zame¹, Ioana Bica^{2

3}, Cong Shen⁴, Alicia Curth², Hyun-Suk Lee⁵, Stuart Bailey⁶, James Weatherall⁷, David Wright⁷, Frank Bretz^{8

9}, Mihaela van der Schaar^{3

5

10}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Economics and Mathematics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA;
² University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;
³ The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA;
⁵ Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, UK;
⁶ Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁷ AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK;
⁸ Novartis Pharma AG, Basel, Switzerland;
⁹ Section for Medical Statistics, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
¹⁰ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Abstract

The world is in the midst of a pandemic. We still know little about the disease COVID-19 or about the virus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes it. We do not have a vaccine or a treatment (aside from managing symptoms). We do not know if recovery from COVID-19 produces immunity, and if so for how long, hence we do not know if "herd immunity" will eventually reduce the risk or if a successful vaccine can be developed - and this knowledge may be a long time coming. In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic is presenting enormous challenges to medical research, and to clinical trials in particular. This paper identifies some of those challenges and suggests ways in which machine learning can help in response to those challenges. We identify three areas of challenge: ongoing clinical trials for non-COVID-19 drugs; clinical trials for repurposing drugs to treat COVID-19, and clinical trials for new drugs to treat COVID-19. Within each of these areas, we identify aspects for which we believe machine learning can provide invaluable assistance.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; clinical trials; machine learning.