Tempus, a leader in artificial intelligence and precision medicine, today announced a collaboration with Kronos Bio, Inc., to perform sequencing analysis for patients enrolled in Kronos Bio’s Phase 1/2 clinical trial of KB-0742, the company’s investigational CDK9 inhibitor. Tempus will use its xT broad-panel genomic assay to provide retrospective sequencing and analytics for samples related to patients enrolled in the dose escalation stage of the study, with the potential to use the same assay to sequence patients prospectively in the expansion stage of the clinical trial.
Tempus will retrospectively sequence and analyze patient samples for MYC amplification and overexpression. Tempus is overseeing the analysis through its computational biology teams. In addition to the sequencing work, Kronos Bio will access significant cohorts of Tempus’ multimodal database and will work closely with the Tempus computational biology team to analyze those cohorts to help with target enrichment and concordance studies.
“Our aim is to employ Tempus’ comprehensive genomic profiling capabilities to support our sponsor collaborators in expediting their needs to achieve a successful trial,” said Ryan Fukushima, Chief Operating Officer of Tempus. “We look forward to collaborating with Kronos Bio on its clinical trial, of which our xT assay is well suited to identify the targeted subset of potential patients for the expansion of the study.”
“The ability to quickly and accurately determine MYC amplification and overexpression in patients enrolled in our study is essential to helping us test the hypothesis that MYC-dependent tumors have heightened sensitivity to KB-0742, our highly selective and orally bioavailable CDK9 inhibitor,” said Jorge DiMartino, Kronos Bio’s Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President, Clinical Development. “Our partnership with Tempus will enable us to collect important retrospective information about the patients enrolled in the dose escalation part of our clinical trial that we can potentially use to inform enrollment in the expansion stage of our study.”
Tempus’ xT assay combines a 648-gene DNA sequencing panel with whole-transcriptome RNA sequencing to detect clinically actionable gene variants in both solid tumors and hematologic malignancies. The xT assay is used across a diverse set of clinical settings, including leading academic centers, NCI-designated cancer centers, hospital networks, and community hospitals.
