Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Very Brief Blog: Suzanne Belinson's Shift from BCBS Evidence Street to TEMPUS Commercial Markets

While this is not new-news, last fall Suzanne Belison PhD, the founding director of the BCBS Evidence Street tech assessment program, shift to a commercial Vice President role at TEMPUS, the relatively new Chicago-based genomics lab valued at two billion dollars during a recent $110M round.  Linked-In gives her transfer date to Tempus as September, 2018.

TEMPUS particularly emphasizes its genomic big data and analytics capabilities.   This has been an exceptionally active area in the past week, with Sophia Genetics raising $77M, Qiagen buying N-of-1, and Illumina partnering with PierianDx.

Evidence Street was launched by BCBS in December 2016, just two years ago, as a replacement for the prior TEC (technology evaluation center).*   While TEC generally had assessments available open access, Evidence Street is using a subscription model.   See a Summer 2018 interview with Belinson about her goals for Evidence Street here.

In early 2017, there were published rumors, or announcements, or claims, (which I was always skeptical of) that Evidence Street would formally and contractually assist MolDx with evidence evaluations.  That was never finalized.

Belinson will be a speaker at the Precision Medicine World Conference in Santa Clara, January 20-23, 2019.




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* Evidence Street was announced in December 2016, but BCBS filed for the trademark in May 2015.
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In digital genomics, above I cited Tempus's fund-raising and new deals concerning Qiagen/Nof1, Illumina/PierianDx, and Sophia Genetics.  Another example is Mayo's collaboration with Nference (the collaboration titled Qrative), announced in late 2017.
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Archive of quoted sources here.