Phesi has announced that its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven Trial Accelerator platform has reached a critical milestone of now containing global data from more than 100 million patients.

The volume will allow sponsors to access data on patients with over 4,000 indications, plan more successful trials and simulate clinical development activity more accurately.

Phesi’s Trial Accelerator works to deliver digitalised patient data to enhance or replace that collected from clinical trials.

Across the past two decades, data has been collated from product and disease registries, electronic health records, medical claims data and data gathered from around 100,000 dynamically updated sources.

The platform powers the Phesi Patient Access Score, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Data Service and the Digital Patient Profile.

“We have been gathering and structuring a wealth of data for sponsors and clinical trial planners,” said Dr Gen Li, president at Phesi.

He added: “Phesi is able to identify where and when specific data was generated, by whom and how to provide contextualised data that delivers precision, insights and certainty to clinical development teams.”

The DPP now includes relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma, CDKL5, chronic migraine, episodic migraine, stroke, acute ischaemic and acute coronary syndrome, as well as 22 other prevalent diseases and 12 oncology profiles.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology have developed a plastic microfluidic chip to improve the safety and effectiveness of cell therapy treatments for patients living with spinal cord injuries.

In cell therapy, clinicians create induced pluripotent stem cells using skin or blood cells from a patient.

When treating a spinal cord injury, pluripotent stem cells are transformed into progenitor cells, which differentiate into spinal cord cells, which are transplanted back into the patient.

Despite being able to regenerate part of the injured spinal cord, pluripotent stem cells do not completely change into progenitors and can form tumours.

Researchers developed a microfluidic cell sorter to remove around half of the undifferentiated cells in a batch to mitigate potential tumours without causing damage to fully formed progenitor cells.

The low-cost plastic chip device sorts over three million cells per minute and when chained with many devices, it can sort more than 500 million cells per minute.

The team found that pluripotent stem cells were larger than the progenitors from which they derived. The microfluidic device works to leverage this size difference to sort the cells.