Tempus Introduces Loop, An AI-Powered Target Discovery And Validation Platform

The new, proprietary target discovery platform integrates RWD, human biological modeling, and CRISPR screens to accelerate novel target identification

Tempus AI, Inc., a technology company leading the adoption of AI to advance precision medicine and patient care, today announced Tempus Loop, a new oncology-focused platform for target discovery and validation. Loop is Tempus’ proprietary approach to novel target identification that integrates real-world patient data (RWD) with human-derived biological models and CRISPR-screens, all leveraging AI to rapidly uncover insights for pre-clinical therapeutic development.

One of the biggest industry challenges has been translating promising preclinical experiments into treatments that can benefit patients. Conventional approaches in target discovery and validation rely on cell lines or animal models, which may not be reliable representations of human tumors. Loop’s approach is uniquely powerful because it leverages Tempus’ rich RWD to identify patient subpopulations with similar clinical, pathologic, and molecular patterns, followed by use of systems biological approaches to help reveal novel target genes and multimodal signatures. These signatures allow Tempus to seamlessly map patient subcohorts to relevant patient-derived organoids (PDOs), which the company has been expanding for years. By ensuring continuity between RWD and PDOs, Tempus can validate targets using high-throughput functional screens in models that more closely reflect patient attributes. This seamless integration—RWD to PDO and back—can help to enable rapid hypothesis generation and testing in the most relevant disease models, accelerating target discovery and validation.

Tempus has already deployed its Loop platform to prioritize drug targets in patient subpopulations with severe unmet needs for a large pharmaceutical company. By incorporating a lab-in-the-loop strategy, its biological modeling and functional screening capabilities were able to confirm and validate these targets within a year, a significant acceleration of the standard discovery timeline.

“Novel target discovery continues to be a major challenge in oncology. Despite increased spending in R&D, we still have a 90% failure rate for preclinical assets to become real-world medicines,” said Kate Sasser, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Tempus. “With Loop, we have integrated vast multimodal patient data, which includes outcome data, with more relevant human biological models and high-throughput functional screens, all wrapped with AI tooling, to ultimately help find new patient cohorts of interest and unique and clinically relevant targets. We’ve been very encouraged with this platform, speeding up the timelines for our drug discovery customers, while also increasing confidence in the clinical relevance of these targets.”

For more information, visit here (https://www.tempus.com/life-sciences/loop/).

About Tempus
Tempus is a technology company advancing precision medicine through the practical application of artificial intelligence in healthcare. With one of the world’s largest libraries of multimodal data, and an operating system to make that data accessible and useful, Tempus provides AI-enabled precision medicine solutions to physicians to deliver personalized patient care and in parallel facilitates discovery, development and delivery of optimal therapeutics. The goal is for each patient to benefit from the treatment of others who came before by providing physicians with tools that learn as the company gathers more data. For more information, visit tempus.com.