AI well being agency backed by Groupon co-founder hunts coronavirus

Tempus, a Chicago-based know-how firm that gives genetic testing and aggregates medical info, initially centered on most cancers sufferers. However with the coronavirus pandemic spreading the world over, it is becoming a member of the battle towards Covid-19.

Tempus was based in 2015 by its CEO, Eric Lefkofsky, who beforehand co-founded the e-commerce firm Groupon in 2008. However whereas Tempus’ mission could seem far faraway from that of a web-based low cost market, Lefkofsky had private causes for branching out.

“My spouse was identified with breast most cancers about 5 years in the past, and I used to be amazed how little knowledge was really used as part of her remedy, largely as a result of our system makes it exhausting for docs to entry knowledge when making real-time medical choices,” he stated. “It grew to become clear to me that I wanted to try to deal with this downside, and I based Tempus quickly afterwards.”

Tempus, which ranked No. 6 on the 2020 CNBC Disruptor 50 checklist, has three major strains of enterprise. It provides genomic exams that physicians can order, its hottest being a take a look at that appears for over 600 genes related to most cancers. (It doesn’t supply any direct-to-consumer genetic testing, like a 23andMe.)

It additionally companions with tutorial medical facilities and group health-care techniques to arrange and mixture medical knowledge, primarily knowledge held in digital well being information. The medical knowledge is de-identified to guard affected person privateness, then sometimes utilized in analysis tasks to assist perceive patterns. Tempus claims to have one of many largest molecular and medical knowledge libraries.

There’s crossover between these two companies, as knowledge from genomic exams that run in its Chicago and Atlanta labs may be de-identified and added to the molecular and medical knowledge library.

Lastly, it curates and sells de-identified knowledge to pharmaceutical firms engaged on drug discovery.

Tempus is a coated entity underneath the Well being Insurance coverage Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), so the entire knowledge is scrubbed of affected person title, date of delivery, deal with and every other knowledge level that might determine a person.

Early on, Lefkofsky felt that the Tempus platform ought to apply to a broad cross-section of affected person knowledge. For that reason the Tempus platform was designed to be what the corporate calls “illness agnostic,” which implies it may be utilized to  sufferers affected by many sorts of sicknesses, together with most cancers, despair, diabetes, heart problems and Covid-19. 

In April, Tempus started providing a polymerase chain response (PCR) take a look at for Covid-19 from its Chicago and Atlanta laboratories. It at the moment expects to construct its testing capability to roughly 10,000 exams a day within the coming months. The take a look at, supplied by way of physicians, was rolled out parallel to the beginning of a analysis challenge to assemble knowledge on Covid-19 sufferers and search for patterns that may assist physicians treating sufferers in addition to drug-discovery efforts. Procedures might differ from affected person to affected person, however that is the place Lefkofsky thinks the corporate’s AI platform can do probably the most good.

“We’re centered on amassing real-world proof for sufferers which can be Covid-19 optimistic to assist docs stratify sufferers primarily based on danger and assist triage sufferers to the optimum therapeutic path for them, primarily based on their distinctive phenotypic traits,” he stated.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, resident fellow on the American Enterprise Institute and particular accomplice at New Enterprise Associates, sits on Tempus’ board of administrators. He joined after serving as commissioner of the Meals and Drug Administration, the place he spearheaded efforts to advance the usage of synthetic intelligence to create individualized affected person care. 

“I used to be impressed by the corporate’s potential to quickly scale its sequencing operations to assist main tutorial establishments and group oncologists throughout the nation and get knowledge to sufferers and suppliers,” he stated. “They have been centered not solely on the back-end applied sciences to allow these alternatives, however equally necessary the front-end interfaces to make this info helpful on the level of care.”

It additionally launched an initiative whose aim is to mixture knowledge for 50,000 sufferers who’re Covid-19-positive. The hope is that this knowledge will assist reveal genetic traits that trigger particular Covid-19 outcomes, in addition to therapy practices for the sickness.

Gottlieb added that Tempus is partnering with employers and health-care suppliers to assist Covid-19 testing in states the place restrictions are being relaxed, and workers are going again to work, in order that they’ll know what to be careful for.

“We will should be extra aggressive in detecting and figuring out respiratory viruses,” he stated. “To those ends, Tempus can be engaged on a next-generation sequencing panel for respiratory pathogens, together with Covid-19, to diagnose sufferers and create a library for infectious illness analysis that might scale back the affect of future epidemics.”

Whereas Tempus’ use of well being knowledge as a option to speed up analysis reveals promise, there are limitations.

Dr. Jose Morey, Chief Medical Innovation Officer for Liberty BioSecurity and advisor for MIT Resolve and NASA iTech, stated that one downside in counting on AI within the case of a brand new virus is that there is not sufficient knowledge in the meanwhile.

“You need to have massive knowledge units to have the ability to practice, take a look at, and validate,” he stated. “When you may have one thing new and novel like this, they simply do not exist. … It can come ultimately, however not but.”

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He added that the know-how can be solely pretty much as good as the info, and at the moment, there are systemic flaws in the best way medical knowledge is gathered and recorded. For instance, he stated that knowledge in medical facilities may very well be “soiled.”

“Because of this the info will not be structured to be plugged into the mathematics that’s AI,'” he stated. He added that health-care knowledge can be steadily “siloed,” or separated into unconnected compartments. For AI to do its job, it requires massive quantities of interconnected knowledge, which Morey stated does not exist within the U.S. health-care system.

“Well being-care entities, resembling machine producers, digital medical report distributors, and hospitals, aren’t incentivized to share knowledge amongst one another,” he stated. “Because of this there are such a lot of AI firms doing incremental algorithm and utility improvement.”

Whereas this can be a difficult second for the U.S. health-care system, Tempus has been acknowledged by the medical group and traders as an organization whose platform reveals nice promise. 

The corporate has raised $5 billion from such traders as Baillie Gifford, Franklin Sources and T. Rowe Value. It has additionally entered right into a partnership with CVS Well being, which permits oncologists within the CVS Well being/Aetna community to make use of the outcomes of its genomic sequencing exams.

Covid-19 analysis, like most cancers analysis, has but to yield a remedy. Nonetheless, Gottlieb stated that he sees AI instruments as indispensable for most cancers sufferers, infectious illness sufferers and others sooner or later.

“As we accumulate extra knowledge and apply AI instruments to massive datasets, we are able to direct care to sufferers at best danger,” he stated. “Synthetic intelligence might assist us remedy numerous severe public well being issues and enhance outcomes for sufferers with infectious illnesses.”

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor.