Glossary

Short definitions of the terms you'll see in trial cards, filter labels, and chat replies.

Trial identifiers

NCT — ClinicalTrials.gov ID. Format NCT00000000. The international registry run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. We index ~121,000 of these.

CTRI — Clinical Trials Registry of India ID. Format CTRI/YYYY/000/000000. Operated by ICMR. We index ~6,000 of these.

A trial may have both — see the "Also: CTRI/…" badge on cross-registered cards.

Intent

Every trial is classified into one of these by our LLM intent classifier:

• treatment — drug, regimen, surgery, radiation, anything that aims to alter disease course
• supportive_care — symptoms, quality of life, caregivers, survivorship
• diagnostic — biopsy, imaging, lab tests
• screening — asymptomatic-population screening
• prevention — vaccines, lifestyle, chemoprevention
• observational — registry, epidemiology, natural history
• not_cancer — slipped through the cancer-keyword filter

Default search shows treatment only. Use the intent pills to widen.

Phase

• Phase 1 — safety, dose-finding, small participant counts
• Phase 1/2 — combined early-phase
• Phase 2 — efficacy + safety, moderate scale
• Phase 2/3 — combined
• Phase 3 — pivotal, large, randomized vs standard of care
• Phase 4 — post-approval surveillance
• N/A — not applicable (observational, etc.)

Phase filtering in Chat is limited; use Advanced Search for strict phase filters.

Recruitment status

• Recruiting — enrolling now (default filter)
• Not yet recruiting — approved, not yet started
• Active, not recruiting — running but closed to new enrollment
• Enrolling by invitation — selective enrollment, not open to public
• Completed / Terminated / Suspended / Withdrawn — closed in various ways
• Unknown — registry didn't tell us

The first three plus Recruiting are "open" — what Advanced Search treats as enrollable when the "Only sites currently recruiting" toggle is on.

Cancer site and subtype

cancer_site is the broad anatomical category (lung, breast, blood, skin, …). cancer_subtype is the histological or molecular subtype within a site (nsclc_adenocarcinoma, triple_negative, aml, multiple_myeloma, …).

Common patient-spoken terms often map to a site, not a subtype:

• "melanoma" → cancer_site=skin
• "leukemia" → cancer_site=blood
• "lymphoma" → cancer_site=blood
• "myeloma" → cancer_site=blood
• "glioma" / "glioblastoma" → cancer_site=brain

Biomarkers

biomarker_required — the trial demands the patient be positive for this. Filtering by EGFR here means "I am EGFR-positive; find trials that require it." We also auto-hide trials whose biomarker_excluded includes the same marker, so disqualifying trials never appear.

biomarker_expression — thresholded expression filters (PD_L1_TPS_GTE_50, etc.). Less common; use biomarker_required first.

Umbrella terms — triple_negative, HR_POS, HER2_POS etc. are resolved across both dimensions automatically.

Line of therapy

• first_line — initial treatment, treatment-naive
• second_line — after one prior regimen
• third_line_plus — after two or more
• maintenance — after primary therapy completes, before progression
• salvage — after exhausting standard options
• neoadjuvant — before primary therapy (typically surgery)
• adjuvant — after primary therapy (typically surgery)

Basket / pan-tumor

A trial open to multiple cancer types based on a shared molecular feature, not a shared anatomy. A "Basket" badge on a trial card means it's pan-tumor — it appears under your anatomy-specific search because it accepts your tumor type among many.