Caris Life Sciences, a leading biotechnology company focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine, announced the launch of a prospective observational trial that will assess the likelihood of benefit from therapeutic agents identified by the company’s panomic tumor profiling service, Caris Molecular Intelligence. In collaboration with Vector Oncology, the study will evaluate the benefit of Caris Molecular Intelligence-guided therapies in patients with advanced cancer that has progressed following standard-of-care treatment.

The prospective observational trial will determine the clinical utility of Caris Molecular Intelligence in assessing agents that are likely or unlikely to be of benefit. Clinical utility will be measured by comparing patients’ progression-free survival under a therapy guided by Caris Molecular Intelligence versus their immediate prior progression-free survival under non-guided therapy.

“In the treatment of rare and advanced refractory cancers, patients often exhaust standard-of-care, requiring physicians to make treatment decisions based mainly on clinical judgment,” said Razelle Kurzrock, M.D., Chief, Division of Hematology & Oncology at University of California, San Diego, Moores Cancer Center and lead investigator of the study. “It is our hope that this research will build upon the growing body of evidence that suggests comprehensive tumor profiling may guide treatment decisions for this challenging patient population and improve patient outcomes.”

The study, to be performed in up to 20 clinical sites, will be conducted across the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network (Network), which is a collaboration of leading academic and community thought leaders established by Caris Life Sciences. Through collaborative research and innovative patient outcome tracking, the Network is collectively working together to develop guidelines and standards for tumor profiling in oncology.

“Not only is this study important in demonstrating how multi-platform molecular profiling with Caris Molecular Intelligence can improve patient outcomes, but it is also a major milestone for the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network,” said Sandeep K. Reddy, M.D., Chief Medical Officer at Caris Life Sciences. “This is the first of many research initiatives that the Network will champion to further enable personalized cancer care and establish industry-defining standards for molecular profiling in oncology practice.”

In recent years, tumor profiling has become a valuable tool for oncologists when making treatment decisions for patients with difficult-to-treat and/or rare and aggressive cancers. Decoding molecular data from a tumor and combining that information with biomarker-to-drug associations from clinical and scientific cancer literature can provide personalized information to aid a physician in making difficult therapy decisions. The Caris Molecular Intelligence system uses multiple technology platforms combined with sophisticated bioinformatics to develop clinically actionable reports for more than 75,000 patients to date.

Vector Oncology is a leader in the design and delivery of care based oncology research and data analytics.