Tempus And Northwestern’s Lurie Cancer Center announce personalized medicine partnership for cancer patients

PRESS RELEASES

09/29/2016

Tempus will provide genomic sequencing and analysis for Lurie Cancer Center OncoSET, Northwestern’s precision medicine initiative designed to provide personalized care and customized treatment for cancer patients.

Tempus, a health-tech company focused on helping doctors personalize cancer care, and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University announced today a partnership to pursue their shared goal of providing precision medicine to cancer patients. Tempus will serve as a preferred partner to handle genomic sequencing and analysis as part of Lurie Cancer Center’s new OncoSET initiative.

“We have built a platform to modernize cancer care by merging powerful analytics with cutting edge bioinformatics to empower physicians to make data-driven decisions tailored to each patient,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Co-founder and CEO of Tempus. “With thousands of clinical trials opening all the time, and with advances in targeted therapies, including the emergence of immunotherapies, it is more important than ever to understand what is happening to a patient at a molecular level.”

Lurie Cancer Center launched the OncoSET (Sequence, Evaluate, Treat) Program on Northwestern Medicine’s Chicago campus to provide personalized care and customized treatments for patients with cancer. OncoSET’s precision medicine approach to cancer care combines genomic sequencing and sophisticated molecular analysis with pathology to identify new, individually tailored treatments and clinical trials for patients whose cancers are resistant to traditional therapies.

“We are pleased to partner with Tempus to achieve our shared vision of taking precision medicine to the next level,” said Leonidas Platanias, MD, PhD, Director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. “Lurie Cancer Center launched OncoSET to deliver personalized, effective cancer treatments to patients who currently have limited options. In the rapidly evolving landscape of precision medicine, our ability to leverage Tempus’ expertise in bioinformatics and technology infrastructure will be a major asset in OncoSET’s arsenal of targeted therapies and novel clinical trials.”

“Oncologists and pathologists need modern and easy-to-use tools to keep up with the ever-increasing amount of data that is being generated during the course of a patient’s treatment,” said Kevin White, President of Tempus. “We have built a technology infrastructure that can gather, store and analyze large amounts of molecular data that match clinical trials and new therapeutic options. This allows physicians to make use of the most information available when making treatment decisions for their patients.”

Tempus, founded in 2015, has built a technology platform that can gather large amounts of molecular data, combine it with phenotypic and therapeutic data and analyze it, looking for clinically relevant patterns. Tempus has recruited a world-class team of accomplished geneticists, computational biologists, data scientists and software engineers who have developed software and analytic tools that work within a hospital’s existing infrastructure to analyze data and provide decision support for physicians whose patients are not responding to conventional therapies.