Benzinga | Nov 9, 2021 11:14AM EST

Kronos Bio Reports Multi-Year Collab With Tempus To Provide Co. With Access To Tempus Platform, No Terms Disclosed

Kronos to receive broad access to Tempus' real-world data and proprietary tools and materials to expand preclinical hypotheses testing capabilities and inform more streamlined clinical trial design

Agreement builds on earlier collaboration between companies announced in February 2021

SAN MATEO, Calif. and CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and CHICAGO, Nov. 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kronos Bio, Inc. (NASDAQ:KRON), a company dedicated to transforming the lives of those affected by cancer, and Tempus, a leader in artificial intelligence and precision medicine, today announced a multi-year collaboration that provides Kronos Bio with access to Tempus' real-world genomic and transcriptomic data and data analytics tools.

Under the agreement, Kronos Bio will have access to a number of precision medicine tools, including Tempus' modeling lab, which houses a growing repository of molecularly profiled organoids. Access to such data and tools will help Kronos Bio accelerate the preclinical and clinical development of its current and future portfolio, by for example, using organoid models to generate biomarker hypotheses that can be tested in the clinic or in virtual molecularly defined patient cohorts drawn from Tempus' extensive data sets.

The collaboration builds on an earlier agreement announced in February under which Tempus is performing molecular characterization of tumor samples from patients enrolled in Kronos Bio's Phase 1/2 clinical study of the company's CDK9 inhibitor KB-0742. Tempus will retrospectively sequence and analyze these patient samples to assess the relationship between MYC copy number, MYC expression levels and clinical response. Tempus will also explore a path to developing a companion diagnostic.

The expanded relationship leverages Kronos Bio's deep expertise in transcriptional regulation and Tempus' next-generation-sequencing capabilities, as well as drawing on each company's computational biology capabilities. Kronos Bio also has the option to join Tempus' TIME Trial(r) Network, which supports rapid patient identification, site activation and enrollment of select clinical trials.

"With a shared commitment to improving patient outcomes, we are building upon our existing work with Kronos Bio to advance the company's portfolio of clinical programs, including lanraplenib and KB-0742," said Marc Yoskowitz, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Life Sciences at Tempus. "We look forward to harnessing the strength of our entire platform to support the discovery and development of novel cancer therapeutics."

The capabilities provided under the expanded agreement offer Kronos Bio the opportunity to access real-world data to further refine current understanding of transcription regulatory networks (TRNs), which could help accelerate clinical development.

"This partnership will bring together Kronos Bio's knowledge and experience with transcriptional regulatory networks and Tempus' sequencing expertise and exceptional data analytics tools and organoid models," said Jorge DiMartino, M.D., Ph.D., chief medical officer and executive vice president, Clinical Development at Kronos Bio. "We are looking forward to working together now and in the future, as we continue to progress our current clinical candidates, test rational combinations, and bring forward new ones, with the goal of getting medicines to patients as quickly as possible."