Mayo Clinic teams up with Groupon founder's machine learning startup Tempus to personalize cancer treatment

Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine and genomic sequencing specialist Tempus announced a collaboration to provide personalized treatment for cancer patients based on analytics and machine learning technologies. As part of two research projects, Mayo will tap Tempus for molecular sequencing and analysis of some 1,000 patients, spanning bladder, breast, melanoma and lung cancers. Physicians and patients, while participating in a research study, will have access to clinically actionable genomic results that guide therapy. Tempus' bioinformatics analytics and machine learning tools will generate data that Mayo Clinic's research teams can use to better understand biomarkers that novel therapeutics can be applied to treat. "The goals of both research projects are to improve patient quality of life by limiting exposure to ineffective agents, decreasing unnecessary toxicity and, most importantly, to improve survival by allowing for more individualized cancer therapy," Mayo Clinic oncology research chair Minetta Liu, MD said in a statement.