Caris Life Sciences®, a leading biosciences company focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine, today announced select year-end financial and operational results for 2014, which include record-setting revenue and continued case volume growth for its panomic, comprehensive tumor profiling service, Caris Molecular Intelligence™.
The company booked record revenue for 2014, and case volume continued to grow with an increase of 45% over the year, January 2014 to December 2014. The rise in case volume continues to expand the total number of patient profiles to more than 68,000 from approximately 7,400 ordering oncologists in more than 65 countries.
Operationally, the company continues to achieve rapid turnaround times (TAT). The average TAT for 2014 was 8.1 days for MI Profile™ orders, the company's flagship tumor profiling service that decodes and integrates genetic, epi-genetic, RNA and protein molecular data through multiple technologies (immunohistochemistry; chromogenic and fluorescence in situ hybridization; Next-Generation, Sanger and pyro sequencing; and DNA fragment analysis). This integrated molecular information is combined with biomarker-to-drug associations from clinical and scientific cancer literature to identify which cancer drugs are more or less likely to benefit patients so that oncologists can personalize therapy for each patient.
"We continue to see strong adoption of our suite of tumor profiling services from our clinician partners, which further demonstrates market demand and need for clinically actionable tumor profiling tools that enable oncologists to deliver precision medicine to cancer patients," said David D. Halbert, Chairman and CEO of Caris Life Sciences. "We accomplished many of the goals we set out to achieve in 2014 and helped thousands of patients in their battle with cancer. We plan to continue the positive momentum in 2015 with expanded services and further contributions to molecular science through our research publications and initiatives."
2014 Highlights and Accomplishments
- The company further expanded its database to more than 68,000 patient profiles, and increased the prospective, observational patient outcomes dataset to approximately 1,100, which includes patient data tracked over a 5-year period.
- The company's active research initiatives resulted in 10 manuscripts appearing in top peer-reviewed publications, 49 abstract submissions, 34 poster presentations and 3 podium/oral presentations at industry conferences.
- Several important new biomarkers were added to the company's tumor profiling service, including PD-1/PD-L1, which associates to novel immunotherapeutic drugs. Caris' commercial database now includes more than 9,000 cases with PD-1/PD-L1 expression results.
- In October, the company announced a pilot program with the National Health Service (NHS) in England to provide access to comprehensive tumor profiling to patients with ovarian and rare gynecological cancers. NHS England supported this initiative through the Regional Innovation Fund, which aims to facilitate rapid evaluation of healthcare technologies and accelerate the spread of best practices across the health service.
- In September, the company selected IBM to support data storage and technical computing to manage the growing scale of molecular information and to accelerate the delivery of our tumor profiling services.
- GenoSpace and Caris entered into a collaborative agreement to enhance data mining capabilities in August. Caris will apply GenoSpace's population analytics to uncover and better utilize key insights from information from its tumor profiling services and robust database.
- The company established a world-class Scientific Advisory Board comprised of 16 distinguished clinical and scientific experts to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative precision medicine technologies.
2015 Major Initiatives
- The company will continue expansion of the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network. Led by Chairman, John L. Marshall, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Oncology at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Chief of Hematology/Oncology at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Vice Chairman, Lee S. Schwartzberg, M.D., Medical Director of West Cancer Center, the Network will help develop standards of care and consensus guidelines for tumor profiling, while participating in research and outcomes tracking initiatives for patients that have received tumor profiling.
- Currently, physicians can order, amongst various other suites of tests, Next-Generation Sequencing services ranging from 46 genes to approximately 600 genes, in addition to other sophisticated tumor interrogation technologies. The company will continue to optimize data analysis capabilities, as well as expand the depth and breadth of its sequencing capabilities.
- The company will release an all new report format for its Caris Molecular Intelligence evidence-guided tumor profiling service. This new format is optimized with input from physicians to allow for quicker interpretation of molecular information to enable timely and accurate delivery of precision medicine.
- After more than 5 years of patient outcome tracking, the company's prospective, observational study has matured and data mining has been initiated. Robust data on more than 1,100 patients will be released throughout the year demonstrating improved outcomes and the clinical utility of Caris' tumor profiling services.
- The company plans to continue investing in tumor profiling studies and other research initiatives in 2015. More than 60 abstracts/manuscripts will be submitted to industry conferences and various publications.
- The company will continue to invest heavily into its proprietary Carisome® TOP™ platform. This revolutionary blood-based technology allows the discovery and characterization of molecular complexes in their native state using microvesicles as the primary biological substrate. The information generated by the technology is ideal for the discovery of new drug targets, expanding the knowledge of pathway perturbations in cancer, as well as providing diagnostic, prognostic, and theranostic information for cancer and other complex diseases.