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Tempus AI is a pioneering healthcare technology company that is at the forefront of bringing artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven precision medicine to the forefront of healthcare. The company's mission is to unlock the true power of precision medicine by creating Intelligent Diagnostics through the practical application of AI in healthcare. Tempus AI has developed a proprietary platform that integrates various components, including data ingestion, harmonization, and structuring, diagnostic testing, and AI-enabled analytics, to deliver personalized and data-driven insights for clinicians and researchers.
At the core of Tempus AI's operations is its Tempus Platform, which comprises a technology platform to free healthcare data from silos and an operating system to make the resulting data useful. This platform is designed to address the limitations of employing technology, data, and AI in healthcare and precision medicine. Despite the increasing availability of healthcare data, physicians and researchers have been largely unable to leverage this data to improve patient care due to data silos, lack of harmonization, and the disconnect between diagnostic data and clinical outcomes.
Tempus AI's approach to solving this challenge is multi-faceted. First, the company has established data pipes, going to and from healthcare providers, to facilitate the free exchange of data between physicians, who interpret data, and diagnostic and life science companies, who provide data. This allows Tempus AI to amass what it considers to be one of the largest libraries of clinical and molecular oncology data in the world.
Second, Tempus AI has developed proprietary software and dedicated data pipelines to create a network of healthcare institutions through approximately 450 unique data connections, many of which supply the company with complex multimodal data in near real-time. This data is then integrated into a unified multimodal database through which Tempus AI offers numerous analytical and decision support capabilities to its customers.
Third, Tempus AI operates three high-throughput diagnostic testing labs that provide next-generation sequencing (NGS) diagnostics, PCR profiling, and other anatomic and molecular pathology tests. Unlike traditional diagnostic labs, Tempus AI can incorporate unique patient information, such as clinical, molecular, and imaging data, with the goal of making its tests more intelligent and insightful.
Tempus AI's products and services are organized under three product lines: Genomics, Data and Services, and AI Applications (Algos). The Genomics product line provides a comprehensive suite of Intelligent Diagnostics to healthcare providers, generating a steady stream of molecular data to fuel the growth of the other two product lines. The Data and Services product line facilitates drug discovery and development for life sciences companies through two primary products: Insights and Trials. The Insights product allows researchers to access large amounts of multimodal healthcare data, while the Trials product leverages Tempus AI's broad network of physicians to provide clinical trial matching services for pharmaceutical companies.
The AI Applications product line is focused on developing and providing diagnostics that are algorithmic in nature, implementing new software as a medical device, and building and deploying clinical decision support tools. The primary product of this line is "Next," an AI platform that leverages machine learning to apply an "intelligent layer" onto routinely generated data to proactively identify and minimize care gaps for oncology and cardiology patients.
One of the key differentiators of Tempus AI is its emphasis on multimodal healthcare data. The company recognizes that most datasets in healthcare are fractured or narrowly focused by disease type or data modality, and almost none are comprehensive enough to provide a full picture of the patient and their clinically relevant characteristics. Tempus AI's Platform is designed to collect data from multiple diagnostic modalities, including NGS, anatomic pathology slides, radiology images, and other laboratory tests, and connect this data to electronic health record (EHR) data, such as key phenotypic characteristics, therapeutic data, and clinical outcome and response data.
Tempus AI's approach to integrating multimodal data has the potential to transform healthcare, particularly in the field of diagnostics. The company's Intelligent Diagnostics concept involves incorporating an individual patient's longitudinal phenotypic, morphologic, and molecular data, including outcome data from their EHR, to give laboratory test results clinical context. By leveraging generative AI on top of large, harmonized, multimodal datasets, Tempus AI aims to make diagnostic tests more personalized, accurate, tailored, and personal.
The implications of Intelligent Diagnostics are far-reaching. In oncology, for example, Intelligent Diagnostics have the potential to incorporate insights from molecular and anatomic pathology, bioinformatics, genomic variant analysis, inherited cancer risk, computational biology, drug label data, noted adverse events, clinical trial data, research publications, investigational studies, care pathways, real-world evidentiary studies, and phenotypic and morphologic data. This comprehensive approach could revolutionize the way cancer is diagnosed and treated, leading to more personalized and effective therapies.
Furthermore, Tempus AI's approach to Intelligent Diagnostics could disrupt the clinical trial process. By contextualizing test results to individual patients, incorporating real-world evidence at scale, and identifying patterns across similarly situated patients, Tempus AI aims to help physicians make better, data-driven decisions about which drug to prescribe, which trial to consider, and so on. This could potentially address some of the inherent flaws in the current clinical trial process, such as the high cost and slow pace of completing trials, the inherent bias in who has access to academic medical centers and emerging studies, and the fact that many new therapies are only effective on a subset of patients that enter clinical trials.
Tempus AI's business model is unique in that it allows the company to unlock value from the data it collects and monetize that data (in de-identified format) across its different product lines. This creates network effects and a compounding impact on the value of each data record in the company's database. The more data Tempus AI collects, the smarter its tests become, the more applications it can launch, the more physicians join its network, further growing its database, and making its tests smarter for clinicians and its database more valuable for researchers.
One metric that illustrates the value of Tempus AI's data is the "Cohort Lifetime Value" derived from records in its de-identified dataset. This metric shows the cumulative revenue attributable to a specific cohort of de-identified records, including revenue derived from both the initial sequencing (Genomics) and licensing and related services (Data and Services), less the initial sequencing costs incurred to generate the data ultimately licensed. The company's analysis shows that the "Cohort Lifetime Value" for its 2018 cohort of sequenced patients was $48.8 million as of December 31, 2023, representing approximately 7.4 times the revenue received from sequencing that cohort in the initial year.
Tempus AI's approach to data collection and analysis is not limited to oncology. The company has extended its Platform to other disease areas, such as neuropsychology, radiology, and cardiology, with aspirations to eventually be in all major disease areas globally.
In the neuropsychology space, Tempus AI offers its proprietary nP assay for pharmacogenomic testing for patients with psychiatric conditions, such as depression, general anxiety disorder, and bipolar disorder. The company is also collecting patient-reported outcome (PRO) data and passive lifestyle measurements to build one of the largest real-world multimodal datasets in psychiatry.
In the infectious disease space, Tempus AI rapidly scaled operations during the COVID-19 pandemic to deliver approximately 2.8 million clinical tests through March 31, 2023. While the company has shifted resources away from COVID-19 testing, it is now focusing on other infectious diseases areas and broader respiratory pathogen testing.
Tempus AI's success is driven by its ability to straddle two converging worlds: deep healthcare expertise, providing next-generation diagnostics across multiple disease areas, and leading technology capabilities, harnessing the power of data and analytics to help personalize medicine. Unlike traditional diagnostic labs, Tempus AI can incorporate unique patient information to make its tests more intelligent and insightful. Unlike technology companies, Tempus AI is deeply rooted in clinical care delivery as one of the largest sequencers of patients in the United States.
The company's proprietary software tools and solutions, such as Hub and Lens, enable multiple stakeholders within the larger healthcare ecosystem to interact with the Tempus Platform and access the company's data and analytical capabilities. Hub is a clinical application for physicians and other healthcare providers, serving as an end-to-end application for ordering NGS tests and viewing results. Lens, on the other hand, is designed for life sciences customers and healthcare researchers, allowing them to identify, license, and analyze cohorts of data for research purposes.
Tempus AI's success is also driven by its ability to leverage the power of AI and machine learning. The company has developed numerous AI models and algorithms, such as the Tumor Origin (TO) algorithm, which predicts the site of origin for cancer patients whose primary tumor site is unknown. Tempus AI continuously monitors the performance of these models and algorithms to ensure accuracy and prevent degradation.
Looking ahead, Tempus AI's vision is to embed AI throughout every aspect of diagnostics to enable physicians and researchers to make personalized, data-driven decisions.
