Oct 30, 2025 By Kristin Emery 4 min read

Imagine you’ve just been told you have cancer and all of the emotions and questions that would race through your mind. Next imagine you get news soon after that you’re eligible for a clinical trial for treatment that could potentially lengthen or save your life.

Allegheny Health Network (AHN) is one of only two health systems in Pennsylvania and 100 across the country helping to test a process to speed up the matching of patients with cutting- edge therapies. AHN is now part of what’s called the Tempus TIME Trial Network, which is significantly increasing patient access to advanced cancer therapies in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

“There have been several patients who have benefited by our ability to quickly open a trial targeting that patient’s specific cancer,” says Dr. Nathan Bahary, Division Chief of Medical Oncology at AHN Cancer Institute and Director of AHNCI Clinical Research. “Patients and their care teams can take advantage of therapies that they might not otherwise be able to obtain at all, or without traveling long distances at great expense.”

The new Tempus TIME system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to do the matching and streamline the process. The Tempus system screens patients from hospitals that participate in the TIME by checking clinical data and other pertinent information against biomarker requirements and genomic sequencing criteria of a specific trial or therapy.

“We are indeed excited about the possibilities these trials offer our patients with ‘hard to treat’ and ‘rare’ cancers,” says Bahary. “However, we can also identify a new treatment that may provide benefit to the patient in more common cancers.”

Once a patient has been screened and matched, Tempus provides the patient’s physician with a report that ranks relevant trials. If the physician expresses interest in enrolling his or her patient in a trial, the hospital and the trial sponsor are put in contact, allowing the patient to be enrolled into the study and dramatically accelerating access to therapies.

One example of how this new system is helping patients access potentially life-saving trials is a patient from Altoona who was diagnosed with a type of lung cancer and was matched with a clinical trial through TIME in less than two weeks. After starting the trial, the mass in his lung shrunk by 40%.

‘Precision therapies’

Targeted, or so-called “precision therapies,” are specialized cancer treatments that focus on molecular and genetic features called biomarkers that are distinct to cancer cells rather than broadly attacking all rapidly dividing cells like traditional chemotherapy.

“These therapies can specifically block molecules that drive tumor growth such as mutated proteins or abnormal gene products, thus interfering with cancer cell survival, growth, and spread while sparing much of the surrounding healthy tissue,” says Bahary. New classes of monoclonal antibodies, small molecule inhibitors, antibody-drug conjugates, and immune checkpoint inhibitors all typically require genomic sequencing and biomarker screening for patient selection into clinical trials. This new AI system helps streamline that process.

“As soon as a patient’s cancer biomarkers are available to us, the results are automatically analyzed, and if a specific match to an appropriate trial is identified, the patient’s treatment team is made aware,” says Bahary. “The team contacts the patient and if the patient is interested in hearing more about the trial, they meet with our trial coordinators. We can then move rapidly, in as little as a week, to open that trial and start the patient on the targeted treatment.”

While clinical trials are a cornerstone of medical advancement, precision cancer therapies face significant challenges, including tumor heterogeneity (the differences between tumors or tumor cells, even within the same cancer type), complex molecular testing, and the need for innovative trial designs.

One barrier the Tempus TIME Trial may help with is the challenge of getting enough patients for a certain therapy trial. This system can help to quickly identify and enroll patients with specific molecular profiles for a certain therapy trial. That is crucial because specialized therapies are the future of medicine. In fact, nearly half of the oncology drugs approved over the last three decades have been precision therapies tailored to patients with specific biomarkers.

“Precision medicine has changed the very paradigm of how we approach cancer treatment,” says Bahary. “The ultimate goal of this program is to rapidly make the most innovative and promising treatments available to all cancer patients.”

AHN is implementing a system-wide approach to ensure that eligible patients are connected to appropriate trials, regardless of where they enter the network, with collaboration across specialties.