Caris Life Sciences CEO and leadership

Brian Lamon is a Chief Business Officer & Head of BioPharma Business Development at Caris Life Sciences.

Dr. Spetzler joined Caris Life Sciences® in August of 2009, and has held several manage­ment positions with increasing responsibilities during his tenure. He leads the company’s clinical testing service and development of proprietary technologies to aid in the creation of precision medicine strategies for individual cancer patients and noninvasive technologies to identify and predict early stage cancer. Using Caris Molecular Intelligence®, ADAPT Biotargeting System™, and DEAN™, an advanced AI platform focused on nonlinear feature selection to identify new biological signatures to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment selection, Dr. Spetzler has generated more than 330 patent applications across 37 different patent families and authored 31 peer-reviewed journal articles. He is an innovator in molecular science with a relentless focus on improving patient care through an unwavering commitment to the highest quality, fastest turn-around-time and greatest scientific rigor to fulfill the promise of precision medicine. He has led the development of the company’s exclusive and unique technology, ADAPT, which is able to measure thousands of protein aberrations and is being used to develop early cancer detection assays, discover novel drug targets, and characterize protein differences in each patient’s tumor. During his tenure, Caris has amassed molecular data on 158,000+ patients and clinical outcomes on 20,000 patients since the launch of its molecular profiling service in 2009. He oversaw the design, development, validation and commercial launch of a 592-gene DNA panel in 2015, and recently launched whole transcriptome sequencing (WTS), which builds upon Caris’ expertise in advanced diagnostic testing and molecular insights to gain insight into the RNA profiles of patient tumors. It enables highly sensitive detection of gene fusions, RNA splice variants and gene expression analysis all from one streamlined test. Dr. Spetzler led the development of the company’s proprietary AI platform (DEAN) to create and validate dozens of machine learning signatures, called Next Generation Profiling™ (NGP), thus providing the most in-depth and exclusive analysis and interpretation using the most comprehensive suite of clinical offerings available to cancer patients today. The Company is preparing to launch and continues to develop dozens of unique proprietary AI DEAN-driven, machine learning signatures unlocked from a decade of testing patients and accumulating outcomes data to improve cancer diagnosis and therapeutic guidance never before seen. This process has been able to molecularly classify cancer into 87 distinct molecular subtypes that refines and improves current diagnostic standards called the Caris Molecular Disease Classifier. This transformational technology has also been applied to the prediction of frontline folfox administration for colon cancer patients with a hazard ratio of 0.31 and frontline administration of immunotherapy in NSCLC patients with a hazard ratio of 0.33. Thus demonstrating the power of this world changing approach to improving patient outcomes using NGP driven precision medicine.

Michael Sullivan joined Caris Life Sciences in June 2018 and currently serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer. Mr. Sullivan is responsible for the oversight of all Caris sales and marketing activities.

Mr. Sullivan has extensive experience as an oncology diagnostic company executive with expertise in companion diagnostics and precision medicine. Prior to joining Caris, he spent more than nine years at Roche Diagnostics, where he held leadership positions spanning the entire commercial operation. Most recently Mr. Sullivan was Senior Vice President, General Manager, and Business Unit Lifecycle Leader of the company’s core oncology franchise. Prior to his tenure at Roche, Mr. Sullivan spent more than 15 years in key commercial leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics and Abbott Laboratories’ Diagnostic Division.

Mr. Sullivan received his Bachelor of Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Marketing from Texas A&M University.

Dr. Korn joined Caris Life Sciences in September 2017 as Chief Medical Officer. In this role, Dr. Korn guides Caris’ research efforts and clinical strategies for innovative precision medicine tools and tumor profiling services. His executive oversight responsibilities include medical affairs, evidence cultivation and the Caris Research Institute™, which has produced more than 150 posters/presentations at major medical conferences and over 50 peer-reviewed publications since 2014.

Dr. Korn has an extensive career in cancer research and clinical oncology. He has long-standing experience in molecular tumor profiling and integration of these techniques in clinical practice. He has authored more than 45 peer-reviewed publications and his research on signal transduction and systems biology of cancer has been funded by the NIH and DoD since 2003. Dr. Korn serves on the Esophago-Gastric Task Force of the NCI GI Steering Committee, and is a member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Esophageal and Gastric Cancer Panel.

Dr. Korn is also Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He founded the Molecular Oncology Initiative at UCSF’s Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC), and initiated and chaired the UCSF Molecular Tumor Board, which is a cross-disciplinary platform supporting clinical decision making based on Next-Generation Sequencing results.

Dr. Korn received his M.D. from Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. He performed his internal medicine and gastroenterology training at Ev. Krankenhaus Dinslaken, Germany, and his medical oncology training from the West German Cancer Center, University of Essen, Germany. He completed post-doctoral training with Dr. Frank McCormick at UCSF.

Ginger Appleberry joined Caris Life Sciences in February 2015 and currently serves as Chief Compliance Officer and Associate General Counsel. She is responsible for the oversight of Caris’ Compliance Program and provides legal support to various business units.

Prior to joining Caris, Ginger was a litigation partner at Locke Lord LLP where she represented clients, including a number of pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers and physicians, facing complex commercial litigation issues, health care litigation and governmental investigations.

Ginger is licensed to practice law in Texas, and holds a healthcare compliance certification (CHC). She received a J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Missouri University of Science & Technology.

Dr. Abraham currently serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer and is responsible for the development of machine learning algorithms via DEAN (Deliberation Analytics), an advanced AI platform that powers blood-based diagnostic assay development, drug target discovery, tumor type assessment and therapeutic selection. He is an inventor on multiple groundbreaking patents involving novel algorithms and predictive signatures, which is ushering in the new era of next generation profiling in precision medicine.

Dr. Abraham joined Caris Life Sciences in 2007 in Information Technology and has since held several management positions with increasing responsibilities. He began his career developing the vast majority of data models and systems driving Caris’ pursuits in precision medicine today. He then moved on to lead the Cognitive Computing group where he was instrumental in helping to identify new biological signatures to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment selection. Dr. Abraham received his bachelor’s degree in Neurobiology from the University of Texas at Austin, pursued post graduate education in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University and earned his PhD in Cell & Molecular Biology at Arizona State University.