The field of cancer clinical research and treatment is at a historic turning point, galvanized by the accepted understanding that cancer is fundamentally driven by genomic alterations. This understanding is being accelerated by affordable genomic sequencing technologies that detect such alterations, and the corresponding connections of this data to disease progression and treatments. As a result, cancer treatment is shifting from a “tumor of origin” (e.g. breast, bladder, etc.) treatment protocol to protocols based on targetable and actionable genomic alterations that are identified through molecular diagnostics.
Along with the ability to understand the mechanisms related to cancer, we also have corresponding data from large cohorts of cancer patients and the computational ability to correlate attributes of a single patient to one or more relevant cohorts. Such correlation allows researchers to uncover shared disease drivers, and allows physicians to develop treatment plans based on protocols that were effective or not effective for similar patients. PrecisionProfile is focused on enabling the precision medicine community to “make sense” of genomic profiles to create personalized treatment plans for patients. The University of Colorado Cancer Center has developed a genomic analytics platform and a “patients like mine” cohort analytics approach, and PrecisionProfile has been formed as an Anschutz Medical Campus spinoff to create a product to advance the practice of cancer precision medicine.
