How a Groupon co-founder's experience with lack of cancer data data led him to start a company that's now worth $2 billion in just three years

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How a Groupon co-founder's experience with lack of cancer data data led him to start a company that's now worth $2 billion in just three years

Eric Lefkofsky Sun Valley

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Eric Lefkofsky, chief executive officer of biotechnology company Tempus, arrives for a morning session of the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference.

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  • Tempus, a cancer care data company, has grown like crazy to a $2 billion valuation.
  • The three-year-old Chicago-based company pulls together data on cancer patients on its platform, including genetic data from tumors and clinical data about how well a patient is responding to treatment.
  • It's part of a growing area of medicine and technology that has attracted billions in funding.

In 2015, the world was just starting to get outraged about drug pricing, Jimmy Carter announced a cancer diagnosis, and the latest venture from Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofksy was just getting off the ground.

Fast forward three years later and that company - Temupus - has catapulted itself into a $2 billion company.

The Chicago-based startup aims to use data to find better cancer treatments for patients, using both clinical data - information about which medications patients have taken and how they responded to them - and data it sequences in its lab based on the tumors and hereditary genetics of cancer patients.

"I started this three years ago because it was apparent to me that somebody had to build systems that would usher in precision medicine," Lefkofsky told Business Insider in August.

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So far, the Tempus has raised $320 million from backers including Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, and New Enterprise Associates. The company now has about 500 employees, hiring at a rate of 20 to 30 people per month and plans to expand into other disease areas beyond cancer.

The founding story

When Eric Lefkofsky's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer about four years ago, he quickly witnessed the shortcomings of the healthcare system.

"I was perplexed at how little data had permeated her care," Lefkofsky said in a 2017 Fortune Brainstorm Health interview. Which is to say, doctors didn't have much access to other cancer patients' data to see whether there were patients like Lefkofksy's wife - and subsequently how they responded to one course of treatment compared to another.

"I would say to people, we're giving more technology to truck drivers to determine which palate of water bottles to pick up on the way somewhere than we're giving oncologists who are making some of the most life and death decisions you're going to make," Lefkofsky said at Brainstorm Health.

After meeting and funding research at cancer centers, Lefkofsky - a serial entrepreneur who's started companies that aggregate large amounts of data - decided to do something about it.

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No different than an Amazon bookstore

For Dr. Gary Grad, an oncologist at Northwest Oncology and Hematology in the Chicago area who has advised Tempus as well as cancer genetics company Foundation Medicine, having access to this cancer data can help in a few ways. Should he encounter a patient in his practice that has progressed beyond standard treatment, he can send out a test sequencing their genetic makeup to see if there's a mutation with a corresponding drug that could make an impact.

"To me it's no different from walking into an Amazon bookstore," Grad said. The books in the stores are organized based on the data Amazon collects, so there might be a shelf of bestsellers based on what people have been adding to their wish list.

After the test results come back, Grad can pinpoint treatments that might work best based on the mutations his patient has, as well as scan through other cases to see how patients with similar diseases fared after being treated with one unexpected treatment or another. The software can also help connect Grad to clinical trials his patients might want to enroll in as well.

Grad sees it as a "paradigm shift." In the past, information from the pharmaceutical industry and academic medical centers had to trickle down to private practices, but now those private practices can be better linked into the research.

"We have the data in our clinics," Grad said.

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Big money in cancer data

There's big money getting poured into collecting cancer data - both clinical and genetic. For example, Roche in June bought out the rest of the Foundation Medicine that it didn't already own for $2.4 billion. It was the company's second cancer-data-related acquisition of the year after Roche scooped up Flatiron Health for $1.9 billion in February. Epic Sciences, which makes a test for people with late-stage cancer to look at cancer cells and match patients up with potential treatments in September raised $52 million in funding.

And the scope is starting to expand beyond cancer data. With its new funding round, Lefkofsky said, the plan is to extend the technology into other conditions, including neurologic disorders, diabetes, immunology and cardiovascular diseases.

Companies like Tempus are racking up these blockbuster valuations "because they touch on so many areas of healthcare," said Thomas Kluz, head of healthcare investing at Qualcomm Ventures who isn't an investor in Tempus. "The healthcare ecosystem over last 10 years has been so focused on data aggregation. Once you build a large dataset, you are able to tell a story that bends the cost curve for healthcare."

Jeff Albers, the CEO of Blueprint Medicines, which is developing targeted cancer treatments based on specific mutations, said he sees cancer data companies as incredibly helpful.

"You can't do this on your own. This is also where oftentimes we're pitted as competitors," Albers said of the targeted-cancer biotech space. "Several targeted therapies need to succeed for this to become real."

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Knowing which cancer patients around the US have particular mutations - not just in academic centers but also at local cancer centers - could speed up development of new drugs that go after those mutations.

Tempus says it's currently working with 50 top cancer centers and 100 hospitals around the US. Its platform currently reaches one of every four cancer patients in the US.

Lefkofsky anticipates the industry will start moving toward a more data-backed approaches to treating diseases a lot faster than expected.

"I've lived through and had big companies in a bunch of the big technology paradigm shifts," Lefkofksy told Business Insider. "Typically when these things come nobody can see them, they're like a tsunami. No one can see them coming."

"I would assume that like other technology paradigm shifts, it'll be way faster than you think."

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