Thermo Fisher Scientific has formed a partnership between PPD clinical research and an artificial intelligence company to support clinical trials with big data and analytics.

According to a press release Monday, the multi-year partnership involves Medidata Acorn AI, a company specializing in pharmacy, specialty distributor and patient services data.

This partnership comes a few months after the completion of Thermo Fisher’s purchase of Wilmington-based PPD last year.

Through this collaboration, PPD and Medidata have formed PPD TrueCast, an application combining extensive patient recruitment and site performance data with predictive models and advanced analytics, the release stated.

The goal of the partnership is to optimize clinical research site selection and speed of patient enrollment in clinical trials.

“Offering one of the industry’s most wide-ranging representations of real-time site performance combined with machine learning, this new platform gives pharmaceutical and biotech companies actionable insights to optimize clinical research site selection, trial enrollment and study cycle times,” the release stated.

PPD TrueCast is a response to the continued growth of the clinical trial industry, David M, Johnston, senior vice president and president of clinical research at Thermo Fisher Scientific, said in the release.

“The clinical trial industry continues to demand new tools in big data and predictive analytics to improve trial planning and execution and accelerate clinical trials," Johnston said.

TrueCast, providing real-time data from global trial sites, uses artificial intelligence to forecast cycle times and enrollment performance.

According to the release, this includes data from Thermo Fisher’s clinical research business from 40,000 sites, 50,000 investigators and more than 2,000 studies. In addition, Medidata’s datasets include more than 26,000 clinical trials and nearly 8 million patients in more than 140 countries.

“... the average Phase III study enrollment period was reduced by an average of 1.5 months in retrospective trial simulations when site recommendation models were utilized to select a portion of the country and site footprint,” the release stated. “Furthermore, Thermo Fisher expects to realize a 30% increase in the accuracy of forecasting trial milestones.”