Caris Life Sciences, a biotechnology company focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine, has appointed the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC), part of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, a center of excellence site in the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network.

"I am excited to welcome the Cancer Therapy & Research Center of UT Health Science Center San Antonio to the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network. Our robust Network consists of academic centers, health systems and community-based practices to holistically develop standardized tumor profiling guidelines," said Dr. John Marshall, chairman of the network, Professor of Medicine and Oncology at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Chief of Hematology/Oncology at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "CTRC is a premier research and treatment cancer center, and we are looking forward to collaborating with the CTRC on precision medicine-based clinical trials." 

As a network member, the CTRC will actively participate in the development of standards of care and best practices for integrating molecular profiling in oncology practice, while also striving to increase widespread adoption and patient access to personalized medicine in clinical settings. The CTRC will also leverage Caris' multiple-technology tumor profiling service, Caris Molecular Intelligence, to enable the practice of precision medicine by identifying therapy options and clinical trial opportunities based on the unique characteristics of a patient's tumor.

"The patented and proprietary offering provided by Caris Life Sciences equips our physicians with the most up-to-date molecular data for our patients. In turn, this enhances therapy selection, clinical trial participation and furthers our understanding of the unique biological make up of patient tumors," said Dr. Ian M. Thompson, Jr., Director of the Cancer Therapy & Research Center. "We are excited to join this Precision Medicine Network, where by collaborating with other large cancer care organizations, we can provide increasingly powerful and timely personalized information to aid physicians in making difficult therapy decisions."

Caris Molecular Intelligence, a service that correlates molecular data from a tumor with biomarker and drug associations from the latest clinical and scientific cancer literature, is the key technology platform used across the Network to enable the delivery of precision medicine. This information is used to help inform treatment decisions by identifying therapies that have the potential to be most effective and to rule out those that are less likely to work, based on the unique molecular characteristics of an individual patient's cancer. Caris Molecular Intelligence is a patented and proprietary offering that uses multiple technology platforms combined with sophisticated bioinformatics to develop clinically actionable reports for more than 90,000 patients to date.