Personalising Cancer With Tempus

Eric Lefkofsky made it big with five startups—most famously Groupon—by harnessing data. Will it work for diseases?

- Noah Kirsch & Michela Tindera

Eric Lefkofsky hasn’t taken a science class since college. But as he meanders through the Chicago lab of Tempus, his medical startup, he presents an air of expertise. “One thing you can see right off the bat is the purple staining of this cell,” he says, pointing to the pathology slide of a patient with breast cancer. He walks past vials of lysis buffer and a $1 million genomic sequencer. “Tempus is attempting to bring the power of artificial intelligence to health care,” he says. “The first step in all that is data.” Assembling data was the first step in Lefkofsky’s other ventures. The 49-year-old has launched five companies worth at least $250 million apiece, each promising to transform an industry by using big data. His best-known venture is Groupon; despite the deals site’s disappointing share price, Lefkofsky is worth an estimated $2.7 billion.

Tempus is predicated on the theory that information, lots of it, will enable doctors to personalise cancer treatments and make them more effective. A doctor treating a patient with lung cancer might send a tumour sample to Tempus for genomic sequencing. Tempus identifies a mutation in the gene for epidermal growth factor receptor, which causes cells to grow and divide too much. With that, the doctor prescribes a targeted therapy that can have better results than chemotherapy.