hasn’t taken a science class since college. But as he meanders through the Chicago lab of Tempus, his medical startup, he presents an air of expertise. “One thing you can see right off the bat is the purple staining of this cell,” he says, pointing to the pathology slide of a patient with breast cancer. He walks past vials of lysis buffer and a $1 million genomic sequencer. “Tempus is attempting to bring the power of artificial intelligence to healthcare,” he says.
So far the 700-employee company has raised $520 million . The lavish $3.1 billion valuation suggests investors expect his approach to make a big score, starting with cancer, then against chronic conditions like depression and diabetes. But precision medicine is a nascent field. Tempus, on its own or with a research partner, has published fewer than 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts since its founding four years ago. A competitor, sequencing firm Foundation Medicine, has published over 400 in 9 years.
Lefkofsky spent a few years dabbling on other projects, including Uptake . “I always knew back then, [with] those businesses, that I would be in and out,” he says. In 2017 Tempus reached a licensing agreement with the American Society of Clinical Oncology to extract and organize data from 1 million patient records. Today the company says it already works with 30% of U.S. oncologists; many send patient records and biopsies to Tempus for analysis. Tempus hopes to sequence 120,000 genomic samples for doctors this year.
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Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »