Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen R&D unit and molecular data gatherer Tempus have expanded their partnership to work toward improving cancer care from multiple angles.
Just over one year into their collaboration, the two announced this week that they’ll begin applying Tempus’ artificial intelligence technology and repositories of real-world evidence to Janssen’s drug development efforts to identify potential drug targets and use them to develop new cancer therapies.
Janssen’s data scientists will take advantage of Tempus’ platform, including its massive data library and genomic sequencing technology as well as the TIME Trial Network of healthcare providers and its accompanying clinical trial matching software.
With those tools, the partners will use Tempus’ machine learning and other AI to build algorithms that can sift through clinical, genomic and trial data to identify cancer patients with specific biomarkers and other molecular-level traits to make the process of developing and testing new drugs more efficient.
“We’re excited to expand our collaboration to apply the Tempus AI platform,” said Ryan Fukushima, Tempus’ chief operating officer. “We will explore leveraging our data to develop and co-develop novel AI applications to identify the best treatment options for patients in need and ultimately accelerate the drug development process, bringing novel medicines to patients in a fraction of the time.”
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When Tempus and Janssen initially teamed up for a multiyear partnership in November 2020, they did so with a goal of boosting Janssen’s oncology clinical development programs, largely by streamlining clinical trial recruitment.
As part of that aim, Janssen promptly joined the TIME Trial Network, making it faster and easier for oncologists and their patients across the U.S. to discover which trials of novel cancer therapies they’re eligible to join. The software can also activate new study sites and begin enrolling eligible patients in as few as 10 days.
Another angle of the partnership saw Tempus begin applying its machine learning know-how to the creation of a new predictive model that could further improve biomarker-specific patient matching for Janssen’s clinical trials, speeding up the process of digging through Tempus’ databases to find patients with specific tumor features that may be treated by new drug compounds.
“Janssen is the ideal collaborator for this kind of forward-thinking collaboration, in which both companies utilize their respective strengths to improve patient care,” Fukushima said at the time. “We are harnessing the power of AI and data to deliver patients more personalized therapeutics faster.”
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The J&J segment is far from Tempus’ only partner in its push toward overhauling current standards of cancer treatment. In the last month alone, the Chicago-based company has partnered with both AstraZeneca and Kronos Bio for the express purpose of boosting the biopharmas’ oncology clinical development.
With AstraZeneca, Tempus will offer up its vast swaths of de-identified data and corresponding AI-powered analytical tools to spot novel drug targets and develop them into trial-ready therapeutics.
Meanwhile, Tempus will also give Kronos Bio access to its platform—and specifically its molecular modeling lab and multiomics data—to scour organoid models to identify biomarkers that could potentially be targeted by new drugs, then test those hypotheses either in clinical experiments or in virtual studies of Tempus’ patient databases.