The Clinical Trials Integrated Management System - CTIMS was originally developed at Pugh Lab, University Health Network. As part of our collaboration with MSKCC and DFCI on cBioPortal, we started using MatchMiner. MatchMiner was developed at DFCI in 2016. At UHN Pugh Lab, cBioPortal is used as the source of all research information. Therefore, we developed CTIMS Assembler that transforms cBioPortal input files to MatchMiner input files in 2020.

The genesis for CTIMS Editor came after a few years of using MatchMiner, CTIMS Assembler and cBioPortal. MatchMiner requires clinical trial specification in a language called Clinical Trial Markup Language CTML. It is an open standard that was created by DFCI and Harvard Medical School. Creating CTML files in YAML format files manually was very time consuming and prone to typos and errors. Pugh lab came up with the idea of a software that can create CTML files in a user friendly manner. Our proposal for CTIMS was selected as the UHN CDI Grand challenge Prize Winner in 2022. Pugh Lab and CDI teams collaborated to create CTIMS Editor, while taking into consideration input from multiple users and stakeholders. The new CTIMS Editor software enables users to easily create CTML files. CTIMS awarded Grand Challenge Prize on CDI website CTIMS follows strict UHN Security guidelines.

Following the success of the CTIMS Editor implementation, our lab was part of the team that won the Genome Canada PMATCH grant in December 2023. News release of PMATCH Grant award This grant award enables us to develop our vision further and implement a fully automated trial matching software system which includes clinical and genomic data generated by each patient as well as their individual lines of therapies provided during treatment. PMATCH Grant award details on Ontario Genomics website. From its inception, CTIMS has grown leaps and bounds under the guidance of Dr.Trevor Pugh, our Pugh lab members and our collaborators.

CTIMS has four components namely Assembler, Editor, Matcher and Viewer. The Assembler converts study data from cBioPortal format to MatchMiner format, either from locally saved cBioPortal study files or by retrieving data via the cBioPortal API. CTIMS Editor helps to create CTMLs efficiently and store them in a database. CTIMS Matcher is the DFCI MatchMiner Engine. DFCI MatchMiner uses CTML files to find patient trial matches. CTIMS Editor integrates with MatchMiner via MatchMiner API and Message Queue for supporting QuickMatch. QuickMatch allows the curator to quickly verify the CTML. CTIMS Viewer stores the match results for data analysis and visualization. CTIMS Viewer API supports integration with cBioPortal so that the trial match results can be viewed in cBioPortal along with patient data. CTIMS supports Authentication and Authorization using Keycloak.