Tempus says it will use bioinformatics and machine learning to analyze molecular
breast cancer awareness women joining hands for support

Tempus and the University of Michigan (U-M) Comprehensive Cancer Center said today they will partner to analyze molecular data related to in-vitro biological models developed at the university, with the goal of identifying the most effective care for patients diagnosed with breast cancer.

The collaboration, whose value was not disclosed, is the second between the Cancer Center and the company, which provides clinical decision support through genomic sequencing services and analysis of molecular and therapeutic data.

In the latest collaboration, Tempus said it will use bioinformatics and machine learning to analyze molecular, phenotypic, therapeutic—and to the extent available, outcome data for hundreds of breast cancer patients.

Tempus and U-M researchers plan to use the data to improve the utility of patient-derived biological models designed for drug screening, in order to learn how best to deliver personalized cancer care.

“We are looking forward to working with Tempus, whose technology will help us gain new insight into why certain models are more representative of patients than others, and how we can adopt these models to improve their efficacy,” Sofia Merajver, M.D., Ph.D., scientific director of the Breast Oncology Program at U-M, said in a statement.

U-M’s Cancer Center is one of 47 “comprehensive” centers designated by the National Cancer Institute and one of 27 institutions within the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, which sets national guidelines for cancer care.

In October, Tempus inked a licensing deal of undisclosed value with U-M Cancer Center to commercialize its MI-ONCOSEQ cancer panel. The panel developed under the leadership of U-M’s Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., is designed to help find new treatment options for cancer patients for whom there is either no standard of care, or the standard of care has not proven effective.

Chicago-based Tempus says it aims to build the world’s largest library of molecular and clinical data, as well as an operating system to enhance accessibility and utility of the data for physicians.

“We are looking forward to bringing our technology platform to investigators at the University of Michigan who are working tirelessly to find new avenues to bring precision medicine into the clinic, where it can do the most good,” added Tempus co-founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky.

Earlier this year, Tempus launched a partnership with breast cancer specialist and research teams the University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences (UCM) to detect novel patterns that can predict how patients will respond to treatment.

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