Perhaps diving headfirst into a New Year’s resolution to put itself out there more, Caris Life Sciences is kicking off 2024 with a pair of new collaborations.
Caris—which has built not only a massive compendium of clinical and genomic data, but also a platform that uses that database plus artificial intelligence algorithms to help pinpoint the earliest signs of disease—announced both of the partnerships this week, during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
Coincidentally, one of the collabs builds on another team-up that Caris unveiled at last year’s JPM conference. During the 2023 gathering, Caris described plans to pair its “clinico-genomic database” with ConcertAI’s huge collection of oncology data to offer a more comprehensive resource to biopharma clients looking to develop new biomarker-specific cancer therapeutics.
Since then, Caris and ConcertAI have further expanded their partnership with plans to build a brand-new platform combining their respective mountains of data, which they suggested will serve as “the largest-scale oncology research platform in the industry.”
Now, the duo are taking their talents to Big Pharma. According to a Tuesday announcement, Caris and ConcertAI have signed onto a multi-year deal to offer up their databases to support AbbVie’s work to develop novel cancer drugs. AbbVie will also be able to tap into its new partners’ clinical networks, AI tools and other tech resources to improve patient enrollment and the overall clinical trial process.
Altogether, the three-way partnership “represents a union of cutting-edge technology and pioneering science, leveraging the power of big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to propel our efforts in the fight against cancer,” according to Tom Hudson, M.D., chief scientific officer of AbbVie’s global research division.
Caris’ other newly unveiled deal somewhat echoes the original team-up with ConcertAI. Announced Monday, it’ll see Caris combine its database with Roche-owned Flatiron Health’s own AI-powered platform of real-world oncology data—with an aim, much like that of the ConcertAI deal, of giving cancer researchers a more robust resource to help them develop new precision therapeutics.
As Stephanie Reisinger, general manager of Flatiron’s real-world evidence division, noted in the announcement, joining forces with Caris “has the potential to create the largest and best-in-class clinical-omics dataset with Whole Exome and Whole Transcriptome sequencing coverage, expanding our opportunity to support biopharma in the preclinical stages of drug discovery and translation.”