CHICAGO, Dec. 07, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Tempus, a technology company focused on helping doctors personalize cancer care by collecting and analyzing large volumes of molecular and clinical data today announced the launch of Tempus O, a groundbreaking system that collects, structures and analyzes clinical data from electronic medical records, research databases, images, and physician notes to generate therapeutic insights.
Tempus is committed to building the world’s largest database of combined clinical and molecular data, in order to give physicians and researchers insights into what drives cancer progression, and which treatments may be most effective for individual patients. In oncology, and across healthcare more broadly, datasets are small and disorganized and the most critical data often exists in unstructured free-text documents and images. Without a platform that collects, cleanses, analyzes and applies that data, at scale, we cannot usher in the age of precision medicine. As of today, the largest publicly available dataset of clinical and molecular data includes merely 11,000 patients. This is insufficient, given that 1,688,780 people were expected to be diagnosed with cancer in the United States in 2017 alone. When this dataset is broken down by cancer subtype, key mutations, or treatment and outcome data, the resulting datasets are far too small to reveal useful evidence for clinical decision making.
The first piece of this puzzle is collecting molecular data at scale, which Tempus generates through its CAP/CLIA accredited highly robotic next-generation sequencing lab. The key to understanding the factors driving a patient’s cancer, however, do not lie solely in understanding their genomic profile. Genomic data has to be integrated with clinical data, which is often messy, unstructured, devoid of outcomes and locked away in various independent electronic medical record systems.
Tempus works with leading physicians, researchers, cancer centers and hospital administrators to collect, organize and standardize vast quantities of clinical data. Tempus applies its unique optical character recognition and natural language processing algorithms to identify key factors in the patient’s treatment history. Tempus then validates these findings with a team of qualified healthcare professionals who curate the data before deploying its insights to benefit providers and patients.
“Data in isolation cannot be used to help physicians learn from patients who came before,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Founder and CEO at Tempus. “In order to build a true learning system, we need to know who these patients are, what drugs they have taken, how they’ve responded to those drugs, and what genomic factors seem to be driving their disease —only then can we improve the treatment and outcome for every patient that follows.”
Tempus O can be used as a standalone product or it can be used in conjunction with the company’s sequencing and analytic offerings.
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 and follow us on Facebook (Tempus Labs) and Twitter (@TempusLabs). For more information on Eric Lefkofsky, visit lefkofsky.com.
Tempus:
Clo Ewing
clo@tempus.com