Caris Life Sciences significantly enhances clinical utility of world's leading tumor profiling service through addition of key drug targets for cancer patients

IRVING, Texas, March 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Caris Life Sciences®, a leading biosciences company focused on fulfilling the promise of personalized medicine, continues to enhance its industry-leading comprehensive tumor profiling service, Caris Molecular Intelligence™, now capable of providing an industry-leading 51 drug target associations, including exciting new immunologically-based drug targets. Through these enhancements, Caris Molecular Intelligence will now provide oncologists even more potentially useful treatment information for some of the most challenging cancers, including ovarian, head and neck, sarcoma, melanoma and non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC).

Caris Molecular Intelligence now offers a number of protein targets, including PD-1, a protein expressed by the immune cells (e.g.,T cells) that can help cancerous cells evade the immune system. A number of pharmaceutical companies have promising lead drugs targeting PD-1 in current clinical trials for melanoma, such as immunotherapies like nivolumab and lambrolizumab. These drugs block the PD-1 protein and help the immune system recognize and attack the melanoma cells. PD-1, along with its ligand PD-L1 (now also offered at Caris), both have shown great promise in clinical trials for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as well.

"Caris is committed to providing maximum clinical utility to the physicians and patients who rely on it," said Sandeep K. Reddy, M.D., Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Senior Medical Director at Caris Life Sciences. "With these new enhancements, Caris helps to connect patients battling some of the deadliest tumors with up to 51 drug associations and also groundbreaking clinical studies for immunologically-based drug trials."

The addition of certain key markers to Caris Molecular Intelligence will continue to enhance the service's existing clinical utility by expanding the associations to platinum-based therapies such as cisplatin, carboplatin and oxaliplatin. These therapies are commonly prescribed in ovarian cancer, sarcomas and other challenging tumor types.  Expanding Caris Molecular Intelligence's biomarker associations to the platinum drug class is critically important for treating oncologists seeking additional evidence-guided therapy options.

"The majority of newly-added markers to Caris Molecular Intelligence are proteins, which cannot be assessed through DNA sequencing, but only analyzed via Immunohistochemistry (IHC)," said David D. Halbert, Chairman and CEO of Caris Life Sciences. "Our service, which already identified the largest number of relevant FDA-approved drug associations in the industry today, has now further established itself as the leader in clinical usefulness, offering patients 51 total FDA-approved drug associations as potential treatment options, as opposed to the 19 that can be found through the use of Next-Generation Sequencing alone."

Caris Molecular Intelligence's Clinical Trials Connector has also been substantially upgraded, including a real-time feed from www.clinicaltrials.gov that is updated nightly. The Clinical Trials Connector will also now only display results from open and enrolling trials to improve accuracy and efficiency, as well as include more nuanced filtering abilities, such as side-by-side trial comparison. The service will feature trial matching based on age, gender, tumor type, and biomarker expression level, with trial results formatted as direct links to the trial enrollment site to ensure easy and convenient enrollment.

Other enhancements to the Physician Portal have also been made to streamline the test ordering process for oncologists. Physicians and their staff will now be able to approve testing and order additional tests via e-mail.  These changes will help make the process efficient and simple to navigate for busy oncology offices.

About Caris Molecular Intelligence™

Caris Molecular Intelligence™ has been the leading cancer profiling service on the market since 2006, having been used for more than 60,000 cancer patients and counting by more than 6,000 oncologists in at least 59 countries to help develop individualized and actionable treatment plans that seek to improve patient care.  Caris Molecular Intelligence™ utilizes the most comprehensive range of analytical technologies endorsed by the latest and most robust evidence — immunohistochemistries, fluorescence and chromogenic in situ hybridization, polymerase chain reaction and Next-Generation sequencing – to provide oncologists the most complete and clinically relevant profile of a patient's unique cancer-related biomarkers. Unlike other commercially available tumor profiling services, Caris Molecular Intelligence™ more completely interrogates a patient's unique tumor biology by going beyond just DNA analysis. Caris' service assesses additional important biological components like RNA and protein expression levels to establish a multi-dimensional profile of a patient's tumor that reveals more fully the complex biological processes that are driving that patient's cancer and, therefore, more, relevant targets for potential clinical action. 

With a multi-dimensional profile of a patient's unique tumor, Caris Molecular Intelligence integrates insights from its proprietary and industry-leading evidence curation and bioinformatics platform to identify and report the most clinically relevant associations to drug therapies that are approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration or are in active clinical trials in the U.S. Managed by the Caris Evidence Design Board, a dedicated team of oncology experts that includes 5 Ph.D.s and 6 M.D.s, the Caris Molecular Intelligence evidence and bioinformatics platform curates, classifies and catalogues the findings and evidence from all relevant clinical studies in cancer and cancer biology available in the published scientific and medical literature, using a methodology adapted from the evidence review process of U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org) of the Agency for Health Research and Quality (www.ahrq.gov).  This platform incorporates the review of more than 100,000 publications and counting.  Relying on the most robust evidence that meets Caris' quality standards, the Caris Molecular Intelligence evidence and bioinformatics platform can currently provide therapeutic guidance for up to 51 drug associations with Caris' multi-dimensional approach to tumor profiling, far exceeding the 19 that can be identified using next-generation sequencing alone.  The Caris Molecular Intelligence bioinformatics platform electronically delivers the profile and all of these results in an easy-to-use report format that gives oncologists access to underlying evidence, enabling them to develop tailored treatment plans for each unique patient. For more information on Caris Molecular Intelligence™, visit www.carismolecularintelligence.com.

About Caris Life Sciences

Caris Life Sciences is a leading biosciences company focused on fulfilling the promise of personalized medicine.  As the first commercial mover in comprehensive molecular profiling in oncology, Caris Molecular Intelligence™ is an industry vanguard, with 60,000-plus patients profiled and counting. Ordered by nearly 6,000 oncologists in 59 countries, Molecular Intelligence correlates molecular data generated from a patient's tumor with biomarker/drug associations derived from clinical cancer literature. Using a variety of advanced and clinically-relevant technologies, Caris provides oncologists with the most clinically actionable information to help them personalize treatment for cancer patients. This multi-technology approach enables Caris to provide therapeutic guidance for 51 drug associations, compared to the 19 that can be found through use of next-generation sequencing alone. The company is also developing a series of blood tests based on its proprietary Carisome® platform — a revolutionary blood-based testing technology for diagnosis, prognosis, and theranosis of cancer and other complex diseases. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Caris Life Sciences offers services throughout the U.S., Europe, Australia and other international markets. To learn more, please visit www.carislifesciences.com.