NEW YORK – Personalis and Tempus AI announced Friday that they are expanding their commercial relationship, with Tempus investing approximately $36 million into Personalis and accelerating its commercialization efforts for Personalis' minimal residual disease test.
Tempus is the exclusive commercial partner for Personalis' tumor-informed MRD test for breast and lung cancers and for immunotherapy monitoring across all solid tumors. Under the expanded collaboration, Tempus agreed to accelerate its commercialization efforts over the first two years and to exercise its existing warrants to purchase 9.2 million shares of Personalis' common stock at an average purchase price of $2.00. Tempus also agreed to purchase an additional 3.5 million shares of common stock at $5.07 per share for a total investment of approximately $36 million. Tempus will own about 19 percent of Personalis' outstanding common stock once the transactions close, the companies noted in a statement.
Personalis also agreed to increase the quantity of patient samples it will accept over the first two years of the partnership.
"We are pleased that our early access program is proceeding well and demand is strong," Personalis CEO Chris Hall said in a statement. "We believe the expansion of the relationship with Tempus will allow us to better capitalize on the opportunity."
The companies announced the collaboration to jointly commercialize Personalis' NeXT Personal Dx test in November, with Tempus agreeing to integrate the whole-genome liquid biopsy assay into its testing menu and market it to oncologists. Tempus also agreed to pay Personalis up to $12 million in milestone payments to help fund the test's clinical evidence development.
In return, Personalis would compensate Tempus for the fair market value of sales, marketing, order requisition, and results delivery services and would provide Tempus with the aforementioned warrants. Personalis also agreed to complete clinical validation work in breast cancer and immunotherapy monitoring and drive reimbursement.
The test, now known as the xM (NeXT Personal Dx) assay, detects circulating tumor DNA in the blood of patients with early non-small cell lung cancer and breast cancer following curative intent treatment and identifies up to 1,800 somatic variants unique to a patient's tumor. The test launched commercially during the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology earlier this year.