Health System Joins Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network to Develop Guidelines and Standards of Care for Tumor Profiling
Irving, Tex., May 4, 2015 – Caris Life Sciences®, a leading biotechnology company focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine, today announced the designation of MedStar Health as a center of excellence site in the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network™ (Network). MedStar has 10 hospitals in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region, and is a leader in oncology research and treatment, with MedStar Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center being the only National Cancer Institute-designated center in the region and one of only 41 in the country.
“We are very pleased to welcome MedStar to the COE Network, especially as MedStar has such a deep commitment to the most advanced cancer diagnosis and therapy regimens,” said David D. Halbert, Chairman and CEO of Caris Life Sciences. “We are beginning to see a groundswell of support for the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network and the development of standardized tumor profiling guidelines to improve treatment outcomes and reduce the financial burden of cancer care.”
As a Network member, MedStar Health will actively participate in the development of standards of care and best practices for integrating and using molecular profiling in oncology practice to increase patient access to personalized medicine in clinical settings. MedStar Health will also leverage Caris’ multiple-technology tumor profiling service, Caris Molecular Intelligence®, to enable the practice of precision medicine by identifying therapy options and clinical trial opportunities based on the unique characteristics of a patient’s tumor.
“Molecular profiling is advancing at a very rapid rate, as are therapeutic mechanisms to target both genetic and proteomic mutations,” said Stephen R.T. Evans, M.D., MedStar’s Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and the health system’s Chief Medical Officer. “We are pleased to be the first system to join the Caris COE Network effort and look forward to collaborating with other healthcare organizations to provide increasingly powerful and timely information to aid physicians in making complex cancer therapy decisions.”
Caris Molecular Intelligence, a service that correlates molecular data from a tumor with biomarker and drug associations from the latest clinical and scientific cancer literature, is the key technology platform used across the Network to enable the delivery of precision medicine. This information is used to help inform treatment decisions by identifying therapies that have the potential to be most effective and to rule out those that are less likely to work based on the unique molecular characteristics of an individual patient’s cancer. The Caris Molecular Intelligence system uses multiple technology platforms combined with sophisticated bioinformatics to develop clinically actionable reports for more than 70,000 patients to date.
About Caris Life Sciences®
Caris Life Sciences® is a leading biotechnology company focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine through quality and innovation. Caris Molecular Intelligence®, the company’s healthcare information and comprehensive tumor profiling service with more than 70,000 patients profiled, provides oncologists with the most potentially clinically actionable treatment options available to personalize cancer care today. Using a variety of advanced profiling technologies to assess relevant biological changes in each patient’s tumor, Caris Molecular Intelligence connects biomarker data generated from a tumor with biomarker-drug associations supported by evidence in the relevant clinical literature. Since 2009, Caris has tracked clinical and outcome data for certain patients undergoing tumor molecular profiling, for which Caris has observed that patients treated with drugs consistent with their molecular profile show a significant increase in overall survival. The company is developing its Carisome® TOP™ technology, a revolutionary and proprietary blood-based platform for the development of novel therapeutics, drug delivery and drug target identification. The technology is also being developed for diagnosis, prognosis, and theranosis of cancer and other complex diseases. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Caris Life Sciences offers services throughout Europe, the U.S., Australia and other international markets. To learn more, please visit www.CarisLifeSciences.com.
Caris Life Sciences Media Inquiries:
David Patti
JFK Communications
dpatti@jfkhealth.com
609-241-7365
