By Deborah Borfitz

February 20, 2025 | The Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, owned and operated by the University of Southern California (USC) through its Keck School of Medicine, will serve as the initial testing ground for a platform powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI) that is designed to streamline clinical trial operations. This is the first U.S.-based academic site in the research network of California startup company Ryght, and the goal is to both increase the number of trials at the Keck School and enrollment within those studies, according to David Friedland, M.D., Ph.D., associate dean for clinical research and director of clinical artificial intelligence applications. 

As the newest member of the Ryght Research Network, the medical school joins a growing global network connecting trial sites, sponsors, and contract research organizations (CROs) looking to make clinical research more efficient. From the site perspective, it’s a way to better match expertise, capacity, and capabilities to study opportunities, he says. 

The network is but one component of a multi-pronged toolset developed by Ryght, which also includes applications for improving site feasibility assessments, the efficiency of protocol development and study conduct, and the ability of patients and referring physicians to easily find appropriate trials, continues Friedland. The Keck School will initially be piloting only the feasibility and efficiency components within USC Norris. 

The organization is “an ideal partner to pilot specific initiatives with Ryght,” says Anthony El-Khoueiry, M.D., associate director for clinical research at USC Norris. “Our large portfolio of trials, centralized and mature research infrastructure, and focus on investigator-initiated trials offer excellent opportunities to deploy and evaluate the Ryght tools.” 

Collaborative work began the first week of this year. MESH Strategic Partnerships at the Keck School of Medicine, which formulates the partnering strategies when USC works with outside corporate entities, played a key enabling role, Friedland says.  

Discussions are underway about possibly extending the reach of Ryght to other non-cancer departments and academic units within the Keck School, which have their own structure for clinical trials and could most benefit from increased operational efficiencies, he adds. The next stop for these talks will be the Southern California Clinical Translational Science Institute, which provides a broad array of clinical and research support services across USC and is designed to “shorten the window from invention to bedside... [which currently] takes decades.”  

Interconnected Offerings

USC Norris will be using the administrative tools of Ryght, founded in 2023, to augment existing operations rather than ceding them to a different platform, stresses Friedland. The Ryght Research Network is the foundational piece and collaboratively endeavors to find the best homes for trial opportunities. 

A representative at Ryght says hundreds of research sites in 17 countries have already formally joined the network, including several large academic medical centers, and others are in the process of signing up. The company just announced that Ryght will be the exclusive AI provider for global CRO QPS Holdings, which is adding its extensive list of 750 research sites to the network. Another major announcement is expected at the end of January.  

Ryght’s generative AI platform is used on the local level in several ways, including to help study coordinators complete study feasibility questionnaires that get submitted to in-network, trial-sponsoring pharmaceutical companies, Friedland says. The system in this way allows them to quickly assess whether the medical school has the appropriate patient population and clinical personnel to conduct a given trial.  

“We always keep a human in the loop to make sure that it is done correctly and without bias and safely, but [the AI tool] allows us to address the feasibility issue more efficiently and more accurately... [so we] agree to the trials that we have the highest chance of enrolling and successfully completing and decline those opportunities that might not fit with our operations,” says Friedland.  

The AI toolkit also assists coordinators who are largely responsible for running clinical trials, and multiples of them, to be more efficient in their work, says Friedland. Managing study protocols involves an assortment of tasks—screening patients, gaining informed consent, administering treatment, collecting data, and monitoring patient safety—and each trial comes with different study visit schedule and roster of associated procedures. 

Clinical trial coordinators can better plan for upcoming visits using the generative AI interface to ensure all study-related activities get done at the correct time and patients being enrolled meet the inclusion criteria. AI ingests the study protocol, which could be “dozens if not over hundreds of pages long,” he explains. “This allows us to interrogate that protocol more quickly for the specific information that is necessary,” for example the lab tests, imaging studies, and other measures that need to be taken at visit number two. 

The Ryght platform also has a natural-language interface that allows patients and referring providers to learn what clinical trials are available and appropriate for a particular clinical situation (e.g., stage 3 breast cancer), says Friedland. Based on their answers to a few questions about the would-be study participant—such as if the patient is over the age of 18, has certain biomarkers present, and whether the cancer has metastasized—the system can more appropriately match that individual to a trial.    

Patients can converse in lay language, as well as have the trial summarized and explained in that manner, he points out. Physicians who have more clinical data and medical understanding can be more technical in their interrogation of the system to identify novel treatment opportunities for their patients and talk more specifically about biomarkers, the pattern of cancer spread, and other therapies that have been tried. 

That the functions offered by Ryght are interconnected is what the Keck School finds so attractive, says Friedland. Other companies offer similar functions but generally as individual components, such as solutions dedicated to identifying patients for trials and trying to navigate them into those studies. 

Among the planned pilots with Ryght is using its AI tools “to expedite investigator-initiated trial development with a focus on informed consent development and protocol writing,” notes El-Khoueiry. 

The Benefits

If all goes well, the partnership with Ryght could extend not only to non-cancer trials but also customization of the tools within USC Norris, and more broadly across the Keck School’s portfolio of clinical trials, Friedland reports. For example, generative AI could summarize all trials at the medical center regardless of specialty, including those uniquely developed and being run by Keck School faculty.  

Friedland says he doesn’t expect competition for trials to become a problem as other institutions join the Ryght Research Network, since most studies already engage multiple academic sites. “If expansion is within the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing ecosystem, that can only benefit USC and give our patients more opportunities to have access to these novel treatments.” 

This is about more than gaining operational efficiencies for trials run out of the Keck School, he says. It is part of the mission of an academic center to rigorously assess the type of administrative tools being offered by Ryght to streamline studies and get useful medicines to patients faster.