Tempus AI, Inc. (NASDAQ:TEM), a technology company leading the adoption of AI to advance precision medicine and patient care, today announced publication of its study, "Actionable structural variant detection via RNA-NGS and DNA-NGS in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer," in JAMA Network Open.

Tempus recently conducted a retrospective study of more than 5,500 patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and found that concurrent RNA- and DNA-based next-generation sequencing (NGS) led to the detection of more actionable structural variants compared to DNA sequencing alone. Specifically, 8.8% of patients had at least one actionable variant – ALK, RET, ROS1, or NTRK1/2/3 fusions, or MET exon 14 skipping alterations – identified by one or both assays. Overall, the concurrent use of RNA and DNA sequencing resulted in a 15.3% increase in identifying patients with actionable variants and more than doubled the detection of emerging, rare structural variants compared to DNA sequencing alone. These findings suggest that concurrent RNA and DNA testing should be more widely implemented in clinical settings to maximize the detection of structural variants.