NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Tempus and the Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine announced today that they plan to collaborate on two research projects to improve personalized treatment for cancer patients.
The two projects will combine Tempus' software and analytics with the Mayo Clinic's experience with cancer research to study 1,000 Mayo Clinic patients. These patients are participating in studies related to immunotherapy in lung cancer, melanoma, bladder cancer, breast cancer, and lymphoma, and endocrine therapy in advanced breast cancer. Tempus' analytics will give physicians and their patients access to clinically actionable genomic results to guide therapy, and generate data to facilitate research on biomarkers and their use as novel therapeutics.
"The goals of both research projects are to improve patient quality of life by limiting exposure to ineffective agents and decreasing unnecessary toxicity and, most importantly, to improve survival by allowing for more individualized cancer therapy," Minetta Liu, research chair for the Mayo Clinic's Division of Medical Oncology and one of the principal investigators, said in a statement. "The collaboration with Tempus allows to generate high-quality, clinical-grade tumor sequencing results that will benefit the research objectives and potentially impact ongoing patient care."
Tempus has developed software and analytic tools that form the foundation of what it calls an "operating system to battle cancer." It will use these technologies to provide sequencing analysis for the research projects.
Over the last several months the company has announced similar collaborations with Rush University and the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center to expand on its work advancing personalized patient care.
"Technology has made incredible advances over the last two decades, but it has not yet fully permeated the healthcare system. We are excited to bring Tempus' operating system and analytical technology to Mayo for the benefit of physicians and patients in their battle with cancer," Tempus CEO Erick Lefkofsky said in a statement.