Tempus

Tempus brings the power of data and artificial intelligence to healthcare. It has a clear mission — to help make sure patients are on the right drug at the right time, so they can live longer and healthier lives. Launched in the United States in 2015, Tempus is now one of the largest sequencers of cancer patients in the world. Having built its platform for oncology, it has expanded to neuropsychiatry, cardiology, infectious disease, and radiology.

In June 2024, SoftBank Group Corp. announced a joint venture, named “SB TEMPUS” with Tempus to provide precision medicine services in Japan and SB TEMPUS initiated its operations in August.

We spoke to CEO Eric Lefkofsky about why he started the business, the power of personalized diagnostics – and at what pace we can expect AI to transform healthcare as we know it.

Why did you launch Tempus?

I started Tempus almost nine years ago, after my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was perplexed at how little data was a part of her care – and how little technology was used in treating cancer patients.

At the time, there was also a new data modality that was gaining prominence called genetic sequencing. More and more cancer patients in the U.S. were being sequenced to figure out if there was something molecularly that was driving their cancer. But physicians were having a hard time interpreting and understanding the results.

I thought, what if we could help them by connecting those results to the clinical data for that patient – who they are, what drugs they’re taking and how they’re responding? Could we infuse the benefits of machine learning and artificial intelligence into the clinical decision support process? That’s what we set out to do.

How did you approach the opportunity?

We built a system to bring clinical data out of these healthcare systems and structure it, make sense of it. Then we built a lab to sequence patients and started putting the two together.

As a result, our tests were smarter, more comprehensive, and easier for physicians to interpret. People began ordering them at scale and Tempus grew rapidly.

What’s your role within the healthcare ecosystem today?

We straddle two worlds.

First and foremost, we're in the business of making diagnostics smarter by using modern technologies – AI, big data, machine learning. As a result, we also produce enormous amounts of data. We de-identify those data sets, then make them available to researchers and people who make drugs – so that they can make them as efficient as possible.

Right now, the bulk of our business is in oncology and divided between two main products- our genomics product, where we sequence patients that have cancer, and our data product.

In the U.S., there are four or five sequencers at scale, but on the data side, there's really nobody at our scale with this amount of data or the kind of tools that we have to help pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies.

What’s your goal?

Our goal is to deploy technologies globally that help physicians uncover new therapies that they know are effective – and identify their patients as being eligible for those therapies.

Can you give an example?

Let’s say I have a patient who has major depressive disorder – severe anxiety – and is on meds.

Let's say that I can look at the clinical data for that patient and see that they’ve been on four different antidepressants over the last two years and are still experiencing significant adverse events relative to their depression: sleeplessness, weight gain, issues like that. I know something's not going well, right? This patient hasn’t found the right antidepressant to control their condition.

Now, let's say I sequence that patient, and I do pharmacogenomic profiling and figure out that that patient has a poor CYP2D6 metabolizer. And the drug that they're taking is known to be less effective for people that don't metabolize CYP2D6 very well.

I can now give that information to their physician or psychiatrist so that they can make a more informed treatment decision. Ultimately that's the goal of diagnostics: to uncover a potential therapeutic path that's more appropriate for that patient.

What progress have you made in the last nine years – and what are you focused on today?

Over the last nine years, we've gone from a handful of people to a team of 2,500. We're now one of the largest sequencers of cancer patients in the world.

More importantly, I think we've shown people in the healthcare ecosystem that there is now an effective, responsible way to combine rich, multimodal healthcare data – and help doctors interpret it. All in real time while patients are being treated. Most of what we're focused on today is about advancing these technologies, not just in cancer, but in other areas like depression or cardiovascular disease or rare undiagnosed disorders.

Until now, we've been focused on the U.S., and we’re excited to announce our partnership with SoftBank Group Corp., who's the ideal partner to bring Tempus to the Japanese market, which happens to be the ideal market. There's no reason that Japan should not lead the entire world in terms of precision medicine. Japan has incredible hospitals, incredibly talented people, and if we can help bring the tools that are needed for AI to make its way throughout the system, I believe that Japan can lead in this category, in a way that is unimaginable. We're excited to start that journey.

Do you think attitudes within the healthcare system need to change too?

Very often, you hear that the healthcare system is slow and archaic, too rigid or regulated – or that they just don't get it. But in the areas in which we operate, we’ve found that physicians in the U.S., which is our main market, are very willing to adopt new technologies and tools if they are convinced that they are helping patients. The bar to adopt new technologies, new drugs, new ways of doing things is very high because they're overworked, overburdened and there's a lot going on. But once you cross that bar and demonstrate real value, we've seen significant adoption.

How do you think AI will change healthcare in the future?

The first goal of AI should be to ensure that every patient, ideally around the world, is always on the optimal therapeutic path. In other words, we don't make mistakes.

Today, we make a lot of mistakes globally. I don't know the number, but it's beyond massive. By some estimates, 30% of all patients are on the wrong therapeutic path. These mistakes are also estimated to represent half of all global healthcare expenditure.

So, you're talking trillions of dollars and tens of millions of deaths. All because somebody didn't get the right drug, the right test, the right medication, the right dose.

AI's very first goal should be to make that go away. I believe that will happen faster than any of us anticipated – probably within the next decade. That will have a significant impact on global healthcare and the global economy.

Will it affect the treatments themselves?

Tempus is in the business of intelligent diagnostics and cancer, with the output being that we license data to make better cancer drugs.

Similarly, as AI becomes pervasive in healthcare, the output will be enormous amounts of data that can be used to make better drugs.

So, just as we've had an explosion in cancer therapies over the past decade based on all the new data that's been generated, you’ll see the same explosion across all disease areas as medical AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) starts to really accelerate therapies.

We’ll go from being plagued by lots of diseases today – cancer, heart disease, stroke and others – to largely eradicating them. I don’t know whether it will take 50 years or 30, but somewhere in that horizon healthcare will be in a very different place.

What are you most proud of as CEO?

There’s a ton to be proud of.

We help tens of thousands of people a year avoid terrible outcomes. Beyond patient impact, we've gone farther than anybody in thinking through how to responsibly deploy AI at scale in a disease as terrible as cancer – and other cardiological and neurological diseases that are plaguing millions of people. The team keeps pounding away at advancing how these solutions can be deployed.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for Tempus, we're a pioneer in this space. There's no one else we can look at and copy. We have to define our role. Innovate. Think it through. Deploy it. We have to learn, pivot and evolve. So that others can follow us.

We've achieved amazing things in the past nine years. I’m excited to see what we achieve in the next nine.

To find out more about the exciting joint venture between SoftBank Group Corp. and Tempus, see our press release, presentation, and the archived video of the press conference.