Eric Lefkofsky helps fight cancer with Tempus
Eric Lefkofsky is known to many throughout the state of Illinois and across the nation as one of the most generous philanthropists today. Lefkofsky made a great fortune early in his career through his work on a number of some of the biggest-name tech companies in the country, including Groupon.
But less well known are the efforts of Eric Lefkofsky to apply the incredible advances in technology that have occurred over the last few decades to the life-saving medical sciences. After experiencing the travails of modern cancer treatment when a loved one was diagnosed with breast cancer, Lefkofksy decided to put his thoughts into action with the 2016 founding of Tempus, a company dedicated to using advanced artificial intelligence to help doctors make sense of the increasingly vast sea of data in which they are inundated.
Tempus has already borne fruit. The company has devised a system of optical character recognition that can take the diverse, unstructured data of handwritten and non-digital medical records and collate that into highly structured, searchable and knowledge-producing structured data. This system is already enabling doctors to delve deep into the medical histories of their patients, allowing for more appropriate treatment regimens and drug selection.
But the most important work of Tempus is still in progress. One of the company’s main projects is taking all of the new sources of data and integrating them all into a single platform with an intuitive user interface that doctors can use to produce incredibly sophisticated queries. Lefkofsky has stated that this system has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of disease, allowing doctors to get a more granular picture of the nature of their patient’s illness and the likely success of various treatments than has ever before been possible.
One area in which Eric Lefkoskfy says there is almost infinite promise is in the coming ability of platforms like that offered by his company to make use of genetic data. Because the cost of genetic sequencing has dropped exponentially, this will provide oncologists and other medical professionals with a treasure trove of data that dwarfs, by astronomical proportions, anything to which they previously had access. This new bounty of data will be so vast that there is no way that individual humans could ever sift through it all. That is where the sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms that Lefkofksy and his company are developing come into play. In time, says Lefkofsky, the platform will allow doctors to ask questions that previously would have required million-dollar studies to answer. And the system will provide answers more thorough and better validated than anything that even the most extensive longitudinal studies could have provided.
The real revolution will be seen in the results. And Lefkofsky is optimistic that those results may ultimately prove to be on the order of those achieved by the introduction of current mainstay cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, radiation and excision surgery. Lefkofsky believes that the level of granular understanding that smart query platforms seeded with genomic data will be able to provide will lead to treatments that are orders of magnitude more effective than those currently seen today.
In time, Lefkofsky believes that cancer could be whittled down to the level of just another chronic illness, like diabetes or emphysema, that can be lived with over long periods of time even if it is still fairly dangerous. Lefkofsky says that simply improving the efficacy of existing treatments, including new classes of drugs like antibody drug conjugates, could potentially improve patient outcomes to the point where living with cancer has little overall effect on the lifespans of those who suffer from it.
