2026 Lustgarten Equity, Accessibility, and Diversity (LEAD) Project Grant Recipient Announced 

Rebecca Snyder, MD, Awarded LEAD Grant to Advance AI-Powered Clinical Trial Matching for Pancreatic Cancer

The Lustgarten Foundation today announced a new Lustgarten Equity, Accessibility, and Diversity (LEAD) Project grant awarded to co-investigators Rebecca Snyder, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Surgical Oncology, and Heather G. Lyu, MD, MBI, Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgical Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The grant will support Snyder and Lyu’s project, ” TrialScribe: Scalable and Transparent Pancreatic Cancer Clinical Trial Matching,” which is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to make clinical trial enrollment more efficient, consistent, and equitable for patients with pancreatic cancer.

Clinical trials are essential to advancing new treatments, but identifying eligible patients remains one of the greatest operational challenges. Today, research teams often rely on time-intensive manual reviews of patient records and complex trial protocols. This process can delay enrollment, overwhelm clinical staff, and unintentionally overlook eligible patients. Because patient identification often depends on individual clinicians and research coordinators, it may also introduce unconscious bias that contributes to disparities in clinical trial participation.

“Clinical trials are how we bring the next generation of treatments to patients, but too many eligible individuals are never identified for participation,” said Linda Tantawi, CEO of the Lustgarten Foundation. “By reducing barriers to participation, Dr. Snyder’s continued work has the potential to accelerate more integrated research and expand access to promising therapies for patients everywhere.”

This new award builds on Snyder’s 2023 LEAD-funded project, “IMPACT Diversity: An Integrated Multi-Level Plan to Address Clinical Trial Diversity,” which implemented a three-part, multi-level intervention to increase enrollment of patients from racial and ethnic minoritized populations into pancreatic cancer clinical trials at UT MD Anderson. Preliminary findings demonstrated that while Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools can successfully identify patients for studies with straightforward eligibility criteria, they are less effective for the complex requirements common in many pancreatic cancer trials. Findings also revealed the need for more sophisticated, scalable approaches that can improve trial matching while reducing barriers to participation.

Expanding of these insights, the team will develop TrialScribe, an AI-enhanced clinical trial matching framework designed to improve how patients are matched to clinical studies. The project has three primary objectives:

• Transform complex pancreatic cancer clinical trial protocols into standardized, machine-readable formats optimized for large language models.
• Extract both structured and unstructured patient information from electronic health records and integrate those data with trial criteria to create a transparent, AI-powered clinical trial matching engine.
• Develop a clinician-facing decision support tool that provides dynamic eligibility recommendations, helping physicians identify appropriate clinical trial opportunities earlier and more consistently.

“Our ultimate goal is to ensure every patient who may benefit from a clinical trial can be identified quickly and consistently,” said Dr. Snyder. “Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform how we connect patients with innovative therapies by reducing the burden of manual screening and supporting more equitable clinical trial enrollment. We are grateful to the Lustgarten Foundation for its continued investment in this work.”

UT MD Anderson is one of the nation’s leading National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers and enrolls approximately 140 to 190 patients with pancreatic cancer into clinical trials each year, providing an ideal environment to develop, validate, and refine this approach. Ultimately, the researchers envision TrialScribe as a scalable framework that can be adopted across cancer centers nationwide, ensuring that patients can access promising clinicals trials regardless of their proximity to prominent hospitals.

Pancreatic cancer does not impact all populations equally. There are significant differences in incidence rates and disparities across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. The Lustgarten Foundation’s LEAD Project supports innovative research that addresses these discrepancies by increasing the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups in pancreatic cancer clinical trials. Dr. Snyder and Dr. Lyu’s proposal was recognized for its novel approach, strong multidisciplinary team, and potential to create a scalable solution, aligning with the Foundation’s commitment to ensure every patient has access to cutting-edge research and clinical trials.