Dr. Spetzler joined Caris Life Sciences in August 2009 and has led our R&D and laboratory operations in a multitude of roles. As President, he currently leads the company’s Clinical Operations, Research and Development, Information Technology, Bioinformatics and Biopharma Services. Dr. Spetzler has generated more than 330 patent applications across more than 35 different patent families and co-authored more than 120 peer-reviewed journal articles.
As an innovator in molecular science and precision medicine, Dr. Spetzler has a relentless focus on improving patient care. He has led the development of each of the company’s clinical offerings, including our launches of clinical Whole Transcriptome Sequencing in 2019 and Whole Exome Sequencing in 2020. More recently he led the launch of our first AI-based clinical products, Caris GPSai™ and FOLFIRSTai™. He also led the recent development and launch of Caris Assure™, a new whole exome and whole transcriptome liquid biopsy assay that sequences DNA & RNA from both plasma and buffy coat to provide sensitive testing to patients without requiring a tissue specimen.
Dr. Spetzler oversaw the development of the company’s exclusive and unique technology, ADAPT, which is able to measure thousands of protein aberrations and is being used to develop early cancer detection assays, discover novel drug targets and characterize protein differences in each patient’s tumor. He also leads the ongoing development of the company’s proprietary AI platform to create and validate dozens of machine learning signatures, called Next Generation Profiling™ (NGP), thus providing the most in-depth and exclusive analysis and interpretation using the most comprehensive suite of clinical offerings available to cancer patients today. The Company is preparing to launch and continues to develop dozens of unique proprietary, machine learning signatures unlocked from a decade of testing patients and accumulating outcomes data to improve cancer diagnosis and therapeutic guidance never before seen.
Prior to Caris, Dr. Spetzler was a member of the research faculty at Arizona State University, where he developed multiplexed nanotechnologies for single molecule detection of nucleic acid and protein targets. He also developed novel methods of using DNA to create biological computers to solve NP-complete optimization problems and built a novel optical detection system capable of measuring single molecule protein conformational changes with microsecond time resolution. At Arizona State University, Dr. Spetzler earned a MS from the School of Mathematical and Statistical Science in Computational Bioscience, a PhD in Molecular & Cellular Biology and an MBA. Dr. Spetzler is an adjunct faculty member of the molecular cellular biology program at Arizona State University, and a scientific and commercial reviewer for SBIR/STTR grants for NSF.