The USC Clinical Trial Recruitment Lab (CTRL), an initiative dedicated to accelerating and improving Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials, will fund four projects testing how artificial intelligence and other digital approaches can strengthen clinical trial recruitment.
Alzheimer’s clinical trials are more complex, costlier and take longer than those in other therapeutic areas, despite the pressing need for new treatments. CTRL evaluates innovative recruitment strategies to improve access and representation in Alzheimer’s trials, with the goal of identifying scalable evidence-based recruitment practices.
The four new pilots, selected from more than 30 applicants, will explore the following strategies:
- Miriam Ashford (University of California, San Francisco) will develop and test a generative AI voice agent to support remote informed consent and assess patient capacity for Alzheimer’s clinical trials.
- Erika Cottrell (OCHIN, a national network of community health centers) and Vijaya Kolachalama (Cognimark) will integrate an AI-enabled diagnostic platform into primary care electronic health record (EHR) workflows to support earlier identification and referral of patients for trials.
- Andrew Kiselica (University of Georgia) will establish a digitally enabled, trial-ready cohort of rural older adults to improve trial recruitment, participant selection and engagement.
- Raeanne Moore (University of California, San Diego) will leverage EHR portals and digital cognitive assessments to accelerate prescreening and better match potential participants to trials.
CTRL is a collaboration between the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics and the USC Epstein Family Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) with funding from Gates Ventures and the American Heart Association.
An estimated 5.6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s and related dementias, a number expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades as the population ages. An extensive therapeutic development pipeline and new early-detection approaches, such as diagnostic blood tests and advanced digital tools, have the potential to reduce the burden of Alzheimer’s.
However, fewer than 1% of eligible individuals participate in Alzheimer’s therapeutic trials due to barriers that include limited patient awareness, health system resource constraints and lack of access to diagnostics, according to Schaeffer research. Certain populations at higher risk for the disease, including Black and Hispanic patients, remain underrepresented in trials.
“We can only innovate as quickly as we can test new therapies,” said Dana Goldman, founding director of the USC Schaeffer Institute. “That’s why it’s crucial we keep expanding the toolkit of evidence-based recruitment strategies for running faster, better trials.”
CTRL previously funded six pilots, some of which have already yielded valuable insights. For example, one pilot found remote blood collection could help identify potential trial participants, while another showed that offering a small gift card significantly increased enrollment in an online memory concerns registry. Details are available on CTRL’s Clinical Trial Knowledge Hub, which features profiles of CTRL pilot projects along with Schaeffer research to inform best practices in clinical trial recruitment.
“Faster and more effective recruitment is essential, and we’re excited to incorporate these solutions in an integrated way as part of our clinical trials,” said ATRI Founding Director Paul Aisen. “As studies move earlier into pre-symptomatic disease, this opens the door to new recruitment paradigms, and continuing to push forward the science of recruitment will be critical to what comes next in Alzheimer’s research.”
