Having met rigorous qualifications, Tempus joins a select group of commercial and academic laboratories designated to cast a wider net for patients to enter the trial
Tempus announced today that it is participating as a CLIA-certified/accredited laboratory for the NCI-Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH or EAY131) precision medicine trial. The trial is being co-led by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group (ECOG-ACRIN). Under the terms of the collaboration, Tempus will reach out and notify treating oncologists from the more than 1,100 clinical sites participating in the trial when the Tempus xT assay identifies gene abnormalities that could make a patient eligible for one of several NCI-MATCH treatments. Tumor gene testing by a designated lab is the only pathway for patients to enroll into the trial.
Tempus xT is a genomic panel analyzing 595 genes that are relevant to the diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic targeting of cancer. The panel sequences a patient’s tumor DNA and RNA, as well as a matched normal blood or saliva specimen.
“Tumor profiling and genomic testing are becoming common in daily practice for oncologists to help guide clinical care for cancer patients,” said NCI-MATCH study co-chair James V. Tricoli, Ph.D., Chief, Diagnostic Biomarkers and Technology Branch, Cancer Diagnosis Program, Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis at the NCI. “We require qualifying laboratories to proactively identify potentially eligible patients for the NCI-MATCH trial.”
If a patient is eligible and is not being treated at one of the sites participating in the trial, the patient can be referred by their oncologist to one of the participating sites. To learn more about NCI-MATCH, including clinical trial sites across the country, visit http://www.ecog-acrin.org/nci-match-eay131.
“Clinical trials are often the best chance that patients with rare cancers or cancers with poor prognosis have at securing more time,” said Gary Palmer, Chief Medical Officer at Tempus. “The innovative design of the NCI-MATCH trial proactively identifies patients rather than following the typical playbook, which puts the burden of finding a potentially life-saving trial on patients and their physicians.”
NCI-MATCH (EAY131 or NCT02465060) is a phase 2 precision medicine trial that seeks to determine the effectiveness of treatment that is directed by genomic profiling in patients with solid tumors, lymphomas, or myelomas that have progressed following standard treatments expected to prolong survival, or for rare cancer types for which there is no standard treatment. Such discoveries could be eligible to move on to larger, more definitive trials. With nearly 40 treatment arms addressing a wide range of tumor types and targeted treatments, NCI-MATCH is the largest precision medicine cancer trial to date.
“NCI-MATCH is a discovery trial whose very nature—identifying and exploring knowledge gaps in precision oncology, and advancing new hypotheses—means studying small subsets of patients,” said ECOG-ACRIN study chair Keith T. Flaherty, MD, director of Clinical Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We are qualifying additional laboratories so we can cast a wider net for patients with the biomarkers of interest.”
NCI-MATCH is unique because of its size and scope. It explores far more tumor gene abnormalities and drugs than any other precision medicine cancer treatment trial. It includes a large number of cancer types where most other trials address a single cancer. The drugs and drug combinations chosen for the trial have either been approved by the FDA for specific cancer types or are still being tested in other clinical trials but have shown some effectiveness against tumors with a particular gene alteration(s).
About Tempus
Tempus is a technology company that is building the world’s largest library of molecular and clinical data and an operating system to make that data accessible and useful. We enable physicians to deliver personalized cancer care for patients through our interactive analytical and machine learning platform. We provide genomic sequencing services and analyze molecular and therapeutic data to empower physicians to make real-time, data-driven decisions. Our goal is for each patient to benefit from the treatment of others who came before by providing physicians with tools that learn as we gather more data. For more information, visit tempus.com.