ViewPoints Interview: Caris Life Sciences’ Dr. Spetzler Shares Insight on AI-Powered Clinico-Genomic Data Platform

In a recent interview with PharmaShots, Dr. Spetzler, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Caris Life Sciences shared his insights and highlights on the launch of CODEai.

Shots:

• CODEai is a real-world clinico-genomic data platform that integrates Caris Life Sciences’ extensive catalog of molecular data with cancer treatment information and clinical outcomes data for ~215,000 patients covering over one million data points per patient
• CODEai provides accurate data visualization and advanced predictive analytics to deliver clinicians, researchers, and scientists with personalized and precise cancer insights
• Caris is also advancing precision medicine with Caris MAI (Molecular Artificial Intelligence) that combines its innovative service offerings

Tuba: Explain briefly about the web based CODEai platform and how does it bring the most out of it?

Spetzler: CODEai is a real-world clinico-genomic data platform powered by Artificial Intelligence. CODEai integrates Caris Life Sciences’ extensive catalog of molecular data with cancer treatment information and clinical outcomes data for over 215,000 patients covering over one million data points per patient.

CODEai is unlike any other real-world cancer data tool. It contains the largest set of integrated molecular and clinical outcomes data in the industry and its ease of use is unparalleled. Caris has the most comprehensive molecular profile on the market and CODEai leverages this extensive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic information and matches it with clinical outcomes to take data and transform it to provide never-before-seen insights into the treatment of cancer by molecular composition. 

Tuba: What makes you motivated and interested to work and develop products in precision medicine and AI?

Spetzler: Patients are at the center of everything we do at Caris, and our company was founded with a simple but powerful purpose – to help improve the lives of as many people as possible. Progress in precision medicine continues to enhance our understanding of cancer and how to best treat it. It allows physicians to develop personalized treatment plans for their patients that utilize the most effective therapies available to them, potentially improving survival results.

Tuba: How does CODEai help clinicians, researchers, and scientists to understand the unique mechanism of cancer?

Spetzler: Integrating Caris’ database of profiled patient cases with associated treatments and outcomes, CODEai allows for customized cohort analysis based on a variety of search queries that include our industry-leading molecular profiling results, demographic data, diagnostic data and treatment and survival data. CODEai provides accurate data visualization and advanced predictive analytics to deliver clinicians, researchers and scientists with personalized and precise cancer insights that can lead to better understanding of how different cancers respond to treatments.

Tuba: What is the significance of AI in the development of Real-World Clinico-Genomic Data Platform?

Spetzler: Human-machine collaboration provides the most comprehensive analysis available today to characterize a patient’s tumor and support treatment decisions. The complexity of the system is too great for humans to decipher alone, and with AI and machine learning systems, vast amounts of clinical data can be analyzed using custom cohorts defined by clinicians, enabling the identification of new molecular subtypes of patients that benefit from customized treatment strategies.

Tuba: Can we have a brief discussion over Precision Oncology Alliance?

Spetzler: The Caris Precision Oncology Alliance (POA) is a growing collaborative network of leading cancer centers that demonstrate a commitment to precision medicine. These centers work together to advance comprehensive cancer profiling and establish standards of care for molecular testing in oncology through research focused on predictive and prognostic markers that advance the clinical outcomes of patients with cancer. Through the POA, Caris partners with top-tier cancer center across the country to leverage cutting-edge cancer research and therapeutic developments for the benefit of all patients with cancer. CODEai is available to members of the POA and offers our member institutions and investigators a unique tool that allows them to collaborate and share data to further advance breakthroughs in cancer research and treatment.

Tuba: What are the roles of POA members in advancing the delivery of molecular testing and raising the standards of care for profiling solid tumors?

Spetzler: The POA consists of leading cancer centers around the world that are committed to precision medicine and work collaboratively to advance the delivery of molecular testing and establish standards of care for profiling solid tumors.  It is the researchers at these centers that are driving the analysis to decipher the perturbations in each patient’s cancer to better understand and treat their disease.

Tuba: Clinico-Genomic data is set to pave the way for smarter and more precise therapies for cancer patients worldwide. Comment over the statement.

Spetzler: AI and machine learning are rapidly transforming the ability to analyze large amounts of molecular and clinical outcome data to provide unique insights into the genetic makeup and treatment of cancer by molecular composition, allowing physicians and researchers, for the first time, to truly decode cancer and improve patient’s lives.

Tuba: What are Caris’ other offerings that aid in advancing precision medicines?

Spetzler: The company’s suite of market-leading molecular profiling offerings assesses DNA, RNA, and proteins to reveal a molecular blueprint that helps physicians and cancer patients make more precise and personalized treatment decisions. MI Exome whole-exome sequencing with 22,000 DNA genes and MI Transcriptome whole transcriptome sequencing with 61,000 RNA transcripts along with cancer-related pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and fungi analysis run on every patient provides the most comprehensive and clinically relevant DNA and RNA profiling available on the market.

Caris is also advancing precision medicine with Caris MAI (Molecular Artificial Intelligence) that combines its innovative service offerings, Caris Molecular Intelligence with its proprietary AI analytics engine, DEAN, to analyze the whole exome, whole transcriptome, and elements of the cancer proteome. This information, coupled with mature clinical outcomes on thousands of patients, provides unmatched molecular solutions for patients and physicians.

Caris Pharmatech is changing the paradigm and streamlines the clinical trial process by assisting biopharma companies with accessing research-ready oncology sites for clinical trials. With over 200 research sites within the Caris Pharmatech Just-In-Time (JIT) Oncology Network, biopharma companies can identify and enroll more patients, faster. Caris Pharmatech JIT Clinical Trial Solutions focus on rapid site activation and patient enrollment to streamline the drug development process. By implementing Caris’ JIT Trial-Matching System, Caris will automatically match patients to clinical trials and sites can be activated and eligible to enroll patients within one week.

Tuba: How does Caris’ CODEai have the edge over other real-world cancer data tools?

Spetzler: CODEai is unlike any other real-world cancer data tool. It contains the largest set of integrated molecular and clinical outcomes data in the industry, cancer treatment information, and clinical outcomes data for over 215,000 patients covering over one million data points per patient, and its ease of use is unparalleled. The tool delivers an unmatched resource for developing a more complete picture of the molecular mechanisms of cancer, which has a dramatic impact on research initiatives, product development objectives, clinical trial services, and target identification opportunities.

Tuba: Can we have a highlight on Caris’ product pipeline? What specific you want to share with our readers/subscribers?

Spetzler: Caris has been developing a blood-based circulating exome assay capable of measuring tens of thousands of biomarkers in the blood. This revolutionary technology shows incredible promise to help patients and doctors find, identify, and treat cancer earlier. The current state-of-the-art for blood-based profiling measures cfDNA, but that can only be found in about 60% of late-stage cancer patients, compared to the Caris approach, which has been successful in measuring biomarkers in all patients. In addition to the blood-based technologies, we continue to explore the use of RNA in precision medicine through the study of RNA-based predictors and RNA fusion analysis. Additionally, our proprietary and advanced AI platform uses the largest existing dataset of tumor profiling results, matched with clinical outcomes, to identify new cancer subtypes with specifically defined molecular signatures.

Tuba: Since 2008, what are the Caris advancements in reinventing cancer care?

Spetzler: Founded in 2008, Caris is on a mission to help patients, clinicians, researchers, and payors navigate, advance, and reinvent cancer care. Our unique combination of expertise, proprietary technologies, clinical testing capabilities, and an extensive library of clinical data enable us to advance precision medicine. Caris has helped to redefine how cancer is understood. In 2008, cancer was a disease of the organ, today there are now cancers defined by their biomarkers; for example, NTRK positive or MSI positives, rather than the organ they started from.

About Dr. Spetzler:

Dr. Spetzler is a President and Chief Scientific Officer of Caris Life Sciences and has joined the company in 2019. He leads the company’s clinical testing service and the development of proprietary technologies to aid in the creation of precision medicine strategies for individual cancer patients and noninvasive technologies to identify and predict early-stage cancer.

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