Eric Lefkofsky considers Chicago his home, and as such he tries to give as much back to the community as he can. His work on a number of important boards including the Board of the Art Institute of Chicago, his postition as Charmain of the Board of Trustees of Steppanwolf Theatre, and his philanthropic foundation, the Lefkofsky Fund are all a part of that. In a differnt way, so is his new Chicago based geonomics startup, Tempus, of which he is one of the co-founders as well as the CEO Lefkosky has been in the tech startup business for some time, and already has the success of one major Chicago based start-up to his credit.
Tempus was created to help analyze data of cancer patients in order to create a database that would better help oncologists understand what kind of treatments work best for which cancers. They are able to analyzize and organize the data from multiple differt kinds of cancers and analyze the geonomes in order to create a more complete picture.
Recently Tempus entered a partnership with the Mayo Clinic to help expand on the data that they already had. Through the new partnership with the Mayo Clinic, the staff at Tempus, of which thier 100 employees include computational biologists, software engineers they are analyzing the data of 1000 patients. Currently the company is able to process the data of 5,000 patients per year. They plan on expanding and hiring more employees this year to increase their capacity. These employees work toghether to create a database of information, which oncologists can then decide how to use.
The Mayo Clinic is giving Tempus data on 1000 of its cancer patients. These are being treated for a variety of cancers, including early and advanced breast cancer, bladder cancer, and lung cancer.
Tempus and Erik Lefkosky hope that this database can help change the way patients are treated. The hope is that the database will further help oncologists understand which courses of treatement work best for differnt cancers. The hope is that patterns will emerge and that there will be much less guesswork for oncologists.
Erik Lefkosky’s Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/eplefkofsky/