Eric Lefkofsky on the future of data and health care.
Can Data Cure Cancer?
Curiosity Speaks with Eric Lefkofsky, Founder and CEO of Tempus, and Griffin MSI Trustee
As research in the life sciences continues to race ahead, Griffin MSI is pleased to convene the Curiosity Society to learn about ongoing advances. Eric invited us to the offices of his company, Tempus, where genetic science is transforming health care by using big data and modern analytics to help physicians personalize treatment with greater precision.
When a loved one was diagnosed with cancer, Eric was shocked at how little data was available to physicians to help them make treatment decisions beyond the standard of care. Eric recognized a gap between the knowledge that existed at the time and the potential bounty of molecular and clinical data that could accelerate the discovery of new therapeutic agents. Tempus was born to help bridge that gap. Three years later, Tempus and its more than 500 employees are changing the way the health care industry tackles disease, starting with cancer.
Eric made an important observation that while different types of cancer can share multiple characteristics, each individual cancer type can also have its own set of features, making cancer, in general, an extremely complex disease to understand and cure. In order to provide cancer patients with the best treatment, the entire cellular profile of their cancer has to be considered in the context of their disease presentation and clinical history.
All of this sounds simple and straightforward. However, it was not being done at the time, at least not by integrating both molecular and clinical data at scale under one roof. With its hundreds of partner hospitals, Tempus has built the world’s largest database of clinical and molecular data and an operating system that will allow physicians to deliver the right treatment to the right patient at the right time and realize the true promise of precision medicine.
In fairness, what is possible today was not possible even a few years ago, let alone a decade ago. Thanks to technological advances, the costs to generate molecular data have significantly decreased, along with the costs to collect, make sense of and store large datasets.
Eric is optimistic that the work Tempus is doing will save lives and lead to more and more cancer patients benefiting from precision medicine.
How effective is Tempus right now? Eric says that today about 25% of cancer patients are touched by Tempus in some way. And now that the infrastructure for aggregation of clinical and molecular data for cancer has been built, the Tempus platform can be easily extended to other diseases such as diabetes, depression and cardiovascular disease.
Question for the Curiosity Society
Griffin MSI is focused on this future, to inspire tomorrow’s adventurers—and the scientists and engineers who will equip them. What will your role be in helping open that door?