Very Brief Blog: Clinical Labs Competing on Technology's Cutting Edge; Spotlight on Caris

In recent months, we've seen announcements from labs like Ambry and Invitae that they are adding services related to RNA sequencing to improve their accuracy in germline genetic mutations (here, here, here).  See a publication from Ambry, Karam et al., here.

I ran across an interesting article on marketing molecular oncology, featuring Michael Sullivan, SVP and Chief Commercial Officer at Caris.  It's at trade journal MM&M, here.  

Along the way, he mentions some of the new technologies that Caris is working on and launching.  These include:

1. Whole Transcriptome Sequencing (WTS), looking at RNA sequence of 22,000 genes
2. Modifications to Caris's current tumor DNA panel
3. Germline-hereditary panel to be introduced
4. NGS profiling tool that "applies our DEAN artificial intelligence tool to our library of cancer cells"
5. A liquid biopsy assay

Caris currently runs 4000 cases per month, about 50,000 per year.  Sullivan comments Caris has tripled its US sales force in "the last six to nine months" and has transitioned onto Salesforce.com.  One year ago, in October 2018, Caris announced $150M in growth capital (here).  This spring, Caris received FDA breakthrough status for its MI Transcriptome CDx test (here).

Regarding DEAN, Sullivan comments, "We’ve developed next-generation profiling (NGP), which uses a deliberation analytics tool (referred to as DEAN) in an AI-powered platform to power analysis of outcomes and biomarker data. We use all of this to generate potential results that will help diversify our offering and improve the overall amount of information we’re able to provide to physicians and clinics."

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MM&M is a medical marketing journal with a lot of open access content.  There is a partner journal Exits&Outcomes which focuses on the digital health industry ($200/year), here.