Tempus Expands Its Role In Fight Against Covid-19
Tempus, a precision medicine company headed by Eric Lefkofsky, is expanding its data services to deal with infectious diseases like COVID-19.
Recently, Tempus, a Chicago company run by Eric Lefkofsky, created a COVID-19 PCR TEST are its labs in Atlanta and Chicago while developing a kind of sequence-based respiratory pathogen panel.
Even more recently, Tempus was able to get emergency funding for a modified version of the Thermo Fisher Scientific ABI YaqPath COVID-19 Combo Kit from the United States Food and Drug Administration.
Eric Lefkovsky’s company called Tempus has also started an initiative to collect and aggregate all the data that they have gotten from about 50,000 COVID-19 positive patients. This also included RNA data from about 10,000 patients. They are gathering this data for academic partners so they can understand better how the pandemic is affecting people.
In June 2020, Tempus made Christopher Mason, an associated professor of biophysics and physiology at Cornell, Vice President of emerging genome technology. His main duties are to develop and advise on technology for next-generation sequencing, to link omics data to clinical metadata, and to study how the host responds to COVID-19.
Mason noted that he will not be permanently Cornel. He is officially taking a leave of absence from Cornell for many months to focus on research and development about COVID-10 with Tempus as well as other organizations. He is taking a break to help as many people as possible that have the pandemic.
Eric Lefkofsky, the CEO of Tempus, believes that the diagnostic approach of his company, using many different types of data from patients, can be applied to infectious diseases like the pandemic. The company originally used its diagnostic approach to cancer, but it can be applied to other types of diseases. When the pandemic hit, Tempus was alrAteady expanding its approach to other types of diseases like the pandemic.
Tempus and Eric Lefkofsky have changed its approach to deal with infectious diseases.