Data as a Lifeline: A New Alliance Targets an Aggressive Rare Cancer

CHICAGO, IL – June 25, 2026 – In the high-stakes world of oncology, some enemies are well-known, while others lurk in the shadows, devastating lives in relative obscurity. Angiosarcoma belongs to the latter group. It is a rare, vicious, and notoriously difficult-to-treat cancer. For the approximately 1,000 Americans diagnosed each year, the fight is often lonely, hampered by a lack of research and limited therapeutic options. A new alliance, however, aims to bring this fight into the light.

AI-driven precision medicine firm Tempus AI, Inc. has announced a research collaboration with the patient-led organization Angiosarcoma Awareness, Inc. The partnership represents a strategic convergence of cutting-edge technology and grassroots advocacy, seeking to dismantle the barriers that have long stalled progress against this disease. By pooling Tempus’s massive library of molecular and clinical data with the focused mission of a patient community, this initiative isn’t just another research project; it’s a potential paradigm shift in how we combat rare diseases.

The Formidable Foe: Understanding Angiosarcoma

To grasp the significance of this collaboration, one must first understand the adversary. Angiosarcoma is a malignancy of the endothelial cells, the very building blocks that line the body’s blood and lymph vessels. This origin gives it a unique and terrifying ability to spread rapidly through the body’s own circulatory highway. Representing just 1-2% of all soft tissue sarcomas, its rarity is a double-edged sword: it affects few, but those it does face a research landscape starved of data and attention.

The prognosis is often grim. With a 5-year overall survival rate hovering between 30-40%, which plummets for patients with metastatic disease, the clock is always ticking. The cancer's aggressive nature is compounded by its diverse origins. It can arise spontaneously, but is also linked to prior radiation exposure for other cancers, chronic lymphedema, and certain chemical exposures. This heterogeneity makes it a moving target.

Treatment has traditionally relied on a brutal trifecta of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. While surgical resection remains the cornerstone for localized disease, the cancer’s infiltrative growth makes achieving clean margins a significant challenge, leading to high rates of recurrence. For advanced disease, chemotherapy regimens like doxorubicin and paclitaxel offer a temporary reprieve but are rarely curative. Newer targeted therapies and immunotherapies have shown promise in subsets of patients, but their success is inconsistent, underscoring a critical knowledge gap: a deep molecular understanding of the disease is still missing. This is the fundamental challenge that has left a void in the development of effective, tailored therapies.

A New Arsenal: Wielding AI and Multimodal Data

This is where Tempus AI enters the battlefield. The Chicago-based technology company has built its entire business model on the premise that data, when aggregated and analyzed at an immense scale, can unlock the secrets of complex diseases. The firm has amassed one of the world’s largest libraries of multimodal data, integrating de-identified clinical information with deep molecular data, including DNA and RNA sequencing, from millions of patients.

For this collaboration, Tempus is contributing its dataset of approximately 600 de-identified angiosarcoma records. While that number may seem small in the context of more common cancers, for a disease as rare as angiosarcoma, it is a treasure trove. Crucially, each record contains paired DNA and RNA sequencing data, creating what the company calls one of the largest and most comprehensive molecular datasets ever assembled for this cancer.

“Angiosarcoma, like many rare cancers, has been understudied because the foundational knowledge needed to develop novel therapy has been limited,” said Ezra Cohen, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Oncology at Tempus. “Precision medicine should not be limited by the availability of data, especially for patients with uncommon and aggressive cancers.”

The strategy is to use artificial intelligence to sift through this mountain of information, hunting for patterns—subtle genetic mutations, expression signatures, or clinical correlations—that are invisible to the human eye and impossible to detect in smaller, siloed datasets. By identifying these biological patterns, researchers hope to uncover novel therapeutic targets, predict which patients might respond to certain drugs, and ultimately design more effective clinical trials. This approach moves beyond the one-size-fits-all model of chemotherapy and toward the ultimate goal of precision medicine: “treating the right patient with the right therapy at the right time,” as Dr. Cohen puts it.

The Power of Partnership: A Model for Collaborative Victory

Technology alone, however, is not a panacea. The true strategic innovation here lies in the structure of the alliance itself—a powerful fusion of corporate technological might with the focused, passionate drive of a patient advocacy group. Angiosarcoma Awareness, Inc. is not just a fundraising entity; it is a patient-driven organization founded by those who have battled the disease firsthand. Its mission is deeply personal: to fund research, support patients, and accelerate discovery.

This collaboration builds upon the foundation of The Angiosarcoma Project, a 2017 initiative involving the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the patient-partnered "Count Me In" program. That project pioneered the model of directly engaging patients to contribute their data and tissue samples for research. This new chapter with Tempus AI supercharges that model with an industrial-scale data and analytics engine.

Corrie Painter, CEO of Angiosarcoma Awareness, Inc., eloquently summarized the historical challenge and the present opportunity. “Rare cancer research has long been constrained by scale. Patients are geographically dispersed, data is fragmented across institutions and no single organization sees enough cases to answer many of the most important biological and clinical questions,” she stated.

By uniting Tempus’s “extraordinary molecular and clinical oncology dataset” with the patient-partnered resources built by The Angiosarcoma Project, Painter sees an opportunity to create an “unprecedented view of angiosarcoma.” This collaboration is a direct assault on the data fragmentation that has hamstrung researchers for decades. It provides a blueprint for how patient communities can partner with tech giants to create shared value, turning the desperation of a rare diagnosis into a powerful engine for scientific progress. This model could prove to be a significant strategic advantage in a competitive field that includes data-driven oncology firms like Foundation Medicine and Caris Life Sciences, demonstrating that deep integration with the patient community can unlock unique and powerful datasets.

This alliance establishes a potential new model for accelerating discovery across the entire spectrum of rare diseases, where the collective power of patients, advocates, and technologists can achieve what no single entity could accomplish alone.