Clinical Trial Integrated Matching System (CTIMS)

Improve efficiencies. Accelerate Cancer Research. Match patients to clinical trials.

Nearly 25% of patients diagnosed with cancer at Princess Margaret Cancer Center are matched to clinical trials and play an important role in scientific discovery. The process to match patients to clinical trials is highly manual, enormously time consuming, and prone to error.

CTIMS aims to reduce the time and efforts for research scientists to match patients to clinical trials.

  • Easily create and validate clinical trial criteria in a secure and user-friendly form.
  • Add new clinical trial criteria to target increasingly specific details.
  • Automatically convert criteria into a clinical trial markup language (CTML)1 used to securely match patient data to clinical trial criteria
  • View clinical trial matches alongside cancer genomic patient data.
  • Use existing clinical data standards such as those established by the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Cancer Centre Network (MOHCCN) to align with other UHN and national initiatives.

How CTIMS works


The CTIMS project is a collaboration between Dr. Trevor Pugh’s lab and members of the CDI program. Team members: Trevor Pugh, Prasanna Kumar Jagannathan, Suzanne Trudel, Philippe Bedard, Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Marian Tang, Sophie Cooke, Anton Sukhovatkin, Mickey Ng, Adam Badzynski, and Sharon Narine.

Contact Information

For more information about CTIMS, contact the team at pmcdi@uhn.ca.
To learn more about the Pugh Lab, visit them at https://pughlab.org/

Additional Information

CTIMS is the winner of the 2022-23 CDI Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge competition offers support in front-end and back-end development, data science, design, and project management. Winning projects are selected based on their alignment with CDI priorities, contribution to the PM community, feasibility, and impact. The next Grand Challenge open call is coming in 2023.

1 Created by Dana Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School