Real-World Data Partnership Aims to Advance Cancer Treatment

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s (MSK) Innovation Hub and Realyze Intelligence, a UPMC Enterprises portfolio company, have launched a collaboration that aims to use real-world, unstructured patient data to improve cancer treatment and care.

Realyze Intelligence leverages artificial intelligence and natural language understanding (NLU), a subset of natural language processing (NLP), to identify treatments for cancer and other chronic diseases.

NLP allows computers to understand verbal and written human language. NLU is more specific in that it relies on syntactic and semantic analyses of text and speech to determine a sentence’s meaning. In medical research, the use of NLU can be advantageous because it helps create a data structure that specifies the relationships between words, which researchers can utilize for sentiment analysis and data mining.

The Realyze platform uses these technologies to analyze patients’ EHR data, including unstructured, free-text clinical notes, to gain a holistic view of the patient. MSK is using the platform to analyze cancer patient records and other types of data to gain insights that clinicians and researchers can utilize to advance cancer care research and treatment models, according to the press release.

Much of the key information in the disease-specific patient summaries generated as part of this partnership comes from the free-text portions of patients’ EHRs, making gathering this information crucial for research and care model development. However, combing patient records to find this information is costly and time-consuming.

"Our goal is to make it easier and more efficient for health systems and cancer centers to understand and use their data to improve patient care," said Aaron Brauser, president and CEO of Realyze, in the press release. "By working with MSK Innovation Hub, we have the opportunity to improve the care and quality of life for patients undergoing cancer treatments by ensuring their health care team has the most accurate and meaningful information."

By using NLU and AI, the researchers can more efficiently mine patient records for data and provide actionable insights to clinicians, the press release states. This could help support timely treatment decisions and improve outcomes for early-stage cancer patients.

"We look forward to working with Realyze through this innovative collaboration," said John Philip, senior director of MSK's Research Support Platform, in the press release. "The data within the clinical notes of patients' medical records may unlock important scientific and clinical correlations. Being able to pull this information in a more efficient way could help connect patients with important resources and help physicians develop the most optimal care plans for their patients."

This is the latest partnership Realyze has undertaken to combat cancer and chronic disease since its launch in June 2021.

Last month, researchers from UPMC Hillman Cancer Center collaborated with Realyze to improve breast cancer care by leveraging the NLU platform to help gauge whether sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) is appropriate in early-stage breast cancer patients younger than 70.