Irving-based Caris Life Sciences—a patient-centric, next-gen “AI TechBio” company and precision medicine pioneer— announced that its therapeutic research arm, Caris Discovery, has entered into a multi-year collaboration and license agreement with Genentech to identify and validate novel oncology targets in solid tumor tissue.

Biotech pharmaceutical and therapeutics firm Genentech, a member of Swiss-based Roche Group, is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.

Under the terms of the agreement, Caris is eligible to receive upfront and near-term payments of $25 million and is also eligible for up to $1.1 billion of potential research, development, commercial, and net sales payments, as well as potential tiered royalties on net sales of collaboration therapies, the company said.

“At Caris, we’re committed to making precision medicine a reality for all patients,” Milan Radovich, PhD, SVP and chief scientific officer at Caris, said in a statement. “This innovative collaboration with Genentech is specifically designed to identify and validate novel targets in solid tumors. By combining Caris’ unparalleled multimodal data and tissue-based discovery engine with Genentech’s deep expertise in therapeutics development, we hope to enable the development of first-in-class medicines for cancer patients.”

“Roche and Genentech are driven by a profound vision—a future where cancer can be cured,” said Boris L. Zaïtra, head of Roche corporate business development. “We have successfully led many fundamental scientific advances in oncology. As we continue to bring forth transformative medicines, collaborations with partners such as Caris allow us to pursue future innovation for patients with unmet needs.”

Unraveling ‘the molecular complexity of disease’

Caris said that it is able to leverage insights from its extensive collection of nearly 500,000 solid tumor samples, along with matched comprehensive molecular and clinical data, to offer sophisticated and flexible target discovery capabilities using both tissue-based and data-centric techniques to biopharma partners.

Caris Discovery scientists use an integrated bioinformatics and wet-lab workflow, combining research from solid tissue and cell-based systems with multimodal data to “validate prioritized targets and help advance the development of next generation therapies,” the company said.

Caris said that it is actively developing and commercializing innovative solutions to transform healthcare. Through comprehensive molecular profiling and the application of advanced AI and machine learning algorithms at scale, Caris has created a “large-scale, multimodal clinico-genomic database and computing capability needed to analyze and further unravel the molecular complexity of disease.”

By combining next-generation sequencing, AI and machine learning technologies, and high-performance computing, Caris said it delivers a “differentiated platform to develop the latest generation of advanced precision medicine diagnostic solutions for early detection, diagnosis, monitoring, therapy selection and drug development.”

In addition to its headquarters in Irving, Caris has offices in Phoenix, New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Tokyo, Japan; and Basel, Switzerland. 

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