Up to 100,000 cancer patients to be profiled each year in huge precision medicine effort

Palo Alto-based software maker Syapse is collaborating with Texan precision medicine company Caris Life Sciences to profile between 50,000 and 100,000 cancer patients each year.

The idea is to merge this information with clinical treatment and outcomes data – so as to provide doctors a powerful tool to evaluate treatment options.

“This is the largest oncology focused effort to combine comprehensive genomic and molecular profiling information with clinical outcomes data,” Caris Life Sciences Chairman and CEO David D. Halbert said in a statement. “It is sure to yield powerful information that will change the future of personalized medicine.”

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Syapse, after all, specializes in integrating omics data with clinical data that comes from medical records, and then algorithmically providing treatment options based on a patient’s individualized profile.

And Caris Life Sciences has its own molecular diagnostics platforms, which use next-generation sequencing panels to assess DNA, RNA and protein expression. It can identify which patients are meant for targeted therapies, immunotherapies and chemotherapies.

The medical record data will be drawn from Caris’ COE Networks: Caris runs a program called the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network, or the COE Network, which is made up of a number of cancer centers that are working to improve molecular tumor profiling in cancer treatments.

The Syapse software will also help patients in this COE Network to gain access to new therapies and clinical trials. The patients will also be able to participate in virtual tumor boards, so they can review cases and share information throughout the network.