Developing a Patient-Friendly Clinical Trial Search Engine

Kathryn Burn, head of Partnerships and Research at Smart Patients, discusses her organization's role in the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

Smart Patients is an online community where patients and their loved ones can talk to and learn from others who may have a similar diagnosis. Eventually, patients started requesting that there was a patient-friendly search engine for clinical trials. So, staff at Smart Patients developed just that.

The organization took information from clinicaltrials.gov and cancer.gov and put it all in an easy-to-read format, where all the information was in one place. The Moonshot aided Smart Patients in cutting-edge cancer data that could also be presented to patients.

Now, the search engine allows patients to develop their "Top 10" list of clinical trials, where they can rate and discuss these trials with their peers.