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Tempus Launches Immune Profile Score Test, Validates Prognostic Utility in Immunotherapy

• By John K. Waters
• 11/18/2024

Tempus AI, a health-care diagnostics company that uses AI to interpret medical tests to help physicians provide more accurate treatment for their patients, announced the clinical rollout of its Immune Profile Score (IPS) test, an advanced algorithmic biomarker designed to guide immunotherapy treatment decisions for patients with stage IV and metastatic solid tumors.

The validation study results, highlighting the test’s utility, were presented at the 2024 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting.

"This is Tempus’ first time leveraging a multimodal algorithm in the immunotherapy space, and we look forward to providing clinicians the ability to use our IPS test to garner data-driven insights that can inform important treatment decisions," said Dr. Ezra Cohen, Chief Medical Officer of Oncology at Tempus, in a statement. "We are excited to introduce this innovative test to clinicians, empowering them with the ability to make more informed choices for their patients while simultaneously moving the field forward in meaningful ways."

The IPS test evaluates a combination of DNA and RNA biomarkers to generate a score between 0 and 100, categorizing patients as either IPS-High or IPS-Low. According to Tempus, the test independently predicts survival outcomes for patients undergoing immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)-based therapies, surpassing traditional markers like tumor mutational burden (TMB), PD-L1 immunohistochemistry (IHC), and microsatellite instability (MSI). Validation involved a retrospective analysis of 1,600 patients with 19 tumor types from Tempus' de-identified real-world database.

The study revealed that IPS-High patients were significantly more likely to experience an overall survival benefit from ICI therapies, with a hazard ratio of 0.45 compared to IPS-Low patients.

"This study demonstrates that IPS scoring is beneficial in that it can identify patients, independent of standard biomarkers, who may have better overall survival with ICI therapy," said Sandip Patel, MD, Professor at UC San Diego Health, in a statement. "IPS scoring can inform tumor-intrinsic sensitivity to immune checkpoint blockade beyond PD-L1 IHC and TMB, and help manage patients on immunotherapy utilizing data already collected as part of DNA and RNA sequencing."

The IPS test is now available as an add-on for clinicians ordering Tempus’ xT (DNA) and xR (RNA) assays. The company is optimistic about the potential of IPS in facilitating expanded indications for ICI therapies in life sciences research.

More information on the validation study is available here.