Tempus, a leader in artificial intelligence and precision medicine, today announced its participation in the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) ComboMATCH group of precision medicine trials. The ComboMATCH trials aim to pair patients with a therapy that has the potential to manage their tumor and help assist physicians in devising more effective treatment strategies for individuals with locally advanced or advanced solid tumors. Tempus is one of the NCI-designated commercial laboratories for the initiative.
Oncologists at participating ComboMATCH clinical sites can leverage their patients’ results from Tempus’ signature xT assay to determine their potential suitability for the program’s treatment trials. There are two components to ComboMATCH. The first is a registration trial where individuals diagnosed with cancer will enroll through their oncologist to have their eligibility determined. ComboMATCH relies on standard tumor testing with next-generation sequencing at a designated lab, such as Tempus, to identify any existing genetic alterations. The assignment to a trial is based on actionable genetic alterations, and the goal is to determine the effectiveness of treating cancer with a combination of medications that target particular genetic alterations.
“We are proud to once again partner with NCI and the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group as they strive to increase patients’ access to clinical trials,” said Ezra Cohen, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Oncology at Tempus. “These kinds of biomarker-driven clinical studies have real potential to positively impact the course of a patient’s treatment journey.”
Tempus is also one of the labs that participated in the original NCI-MATCH trial, which paved the way for ComboMATCH by proving that it was viable to conduct a genomically driven, signal-seeking platform trial across multiple clinical sites. Having completed in late 2022, NCI-MATCH remains one of the largest tumor-agnostic, precision oncology trials undertaken to date, with 38 treatment arms1.
About ComboMATCH
A unique initiative to test new combinations of cancer drugs guided by tumor biology, ComboMATCH (Molecular Analysis for Combination Therapy Choice) is a coordinated set of precision medicine cancer clinical trials led by the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group and National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, through the NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). ComboMATCH trials are led and conducted by the NCTN research groups in the United States, which include the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, Children’s Oncology Group, ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group, NRG Oncology, and SWOG Cancer Research Network. To learn more about ComboMATCH, visit https://ecog-acrin.org/combomatch and https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/clinical-trials/nci-supported/combomatch.
About Tempus
Tempus is a technology company advancing precision medicine through the practical application of artificial intelligence in healthcare. With one of the world’s largest libraries of multimodal data, and an operating system to make that data accessible and useful, Tempus provides AI-enabled precision medicine solutions to physicians to deliver personalized patient care and in parallel facilitates discovery, development and delivery of optimal therapeutics. The goal is for each patient to benefit from the treatment of others who came before by providing physicians with tools that learn as the company gathers more data. For more information, visit tempus.com.
1 O’Dwyer PJ et al. Nature Medicine. June 2023