01/10/2022

Advancing Immunotherapy in Oncology

Authors Eric Lefkofsky, Tempus CEO; Lauren Silvis, Senior Vice President of External Affairs at Tempus

We just witnessed a year of incredible scientific progress, especially when it comes to harnessing the power of the immune system. After seeing the striking impact of mRNA vaccines on Covid-19, we hope that our growing understanding of immunology can deliver similar dramatic results for cancer patients.

We believe that Tempus is in a unique position to advance immunotherapy in cancer. With our combination of clinical and molecular data, we’re building an immuno-oncology platform to analyze both the complexity of a patient’s tumor and the complexity of that patient’s immune system. We already include molecular signatures to guide use of clinically approved immunotherapies. Now, we’re focused on building technology that can profile and interpret aspects of the immune system to bring more personalized treatment options to cancer patients and to support new approaches in immuno-oncology, like novel CAR-T therapies. We’re forging into the world of spatial biology with digital pathology assessment of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes and transcriptomic signatures for T-cell profiling.  And we’re advancing our comprehensive repertoire of multimodal data to better understand how the immune microenvironment influences therapy.

True precision medicine is moving well beyond the model of a single biomarker matched with a single targeted therapy. We believe Tempus can play a critical role in the collective scientific efforts to direct the immune system to fight cancer. We’re aggregating and analyzing data at scale to better understand whether a patient is likely to respond to immunotherapy, and if so, which one. We’re also working to better understand when a patient’s own immune system can be activated to drive an anti-tumor response. For immunotherapy to reach its full potential in oncology, we need data to help us determine the proper targets for reprogramming the immune system, or reactivating T-cells, or eventually, generating a response to cancer vaccines. Tempus is committed to generating the data physicians need to best treat their patients, and researchers need to advance the field of discovery.

Tempus is continually contributing to scientific advancement in the field of immuno-oncology. Our recent work includes:

 

In true precision immunotherapy, the permutations for finding the right treatment for the right patient at the right time are incredibly vast. But if reprogramming a patient’s own immune system is one of our greatest weapons against disease, including cancer, then we must continue to develop and deploy new strategies for leveraging multi-modal data to realize our goals.

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