Rationale and design of the Cancer Immunotherapy Evidence Living (CIEL) Library: A continuously updated clinical trial database of cancer immunotherapies

Background

Immunotherapies for cancers are being tested in large numbers of clinical trials. It is nearly impossible for clinicians and researchers to stay current with the evidence, and traditional systematic reviews and clinical guidelines are not suited to ensure a continued overview of all trials and their results. To address this problem, we have designed a free-to-use, and publicly available database of clinical trials that aims to be continuously updated, the Cancer Immunotherapy Evidence Living (CIEL) Library.

Methods

We aimed to include planned, ongoing, and completed interventional trials of immunotherapies for cancer, regardless of trial design (e.g., randomization, blinding, and type of comparator). We systematically searched PubMed (for published reports) and ClinicalTrials.gov (for registered clinical trials). PubMed retrieved records were screened using the AI-assisted software ASReview and manually extracted and curated. We imported data from ClinicalTrials.gov using the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative database which then requires further curation. The CIEL-Library is available and searchable via a web application ( https://app.ciel-library.org/#/ ). It also contains the ‘Match My Patient’ feature, a patient-centered clinical decision support system, which can filter planned, ongoing or completed trials based on four patient characteristics (disease staging, previous treatments, performance status, and location). We piloted our database with one type of cancer immunotherapy, the tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) transfer.

Conclusion

The CIEL-Library offers a blueprint for a dynamic evidence synthesis infrastructure providing an exhaustive collection of clinical trials with trial characteristics and results, which can be applied across different fields, specialties, and topics. The Match My Patient search function may be very useful to implement trial research into patient-centered care by helping to find a trial for enrolment of a patient or to find results for making decisions, for example, in tumor boards.

The main challenges to making a continuously updated database of clinical trials are the time and resources needed to populate it with curated and updated data. The CIEL-Library project illustrates the potential and the main limitations to designing such continuously updated trial databases that intent to be directly used in routine care.