Though Tempus AI already owned 12 percent of liquid biopsy maker Personalis when it announced its $1.5 billion purchase in July, it was not the only suitor, new documents show.
In fact, there were at least two other companies that made offers for Personalis and its NeXT Personal Dx minimal residual disease (MRD) test, Tempus revealed in an Aug. 31 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Importantly, it appears a significant MRD test developer ‘coveted’ Personalis during its strategic process,” Canaccord Genuity Analyst Kyle Mikson wrote in an Aug. 31 note to investors. “We believe this may bode well for the potential of Tempus’ MRD portfolio going forward.”
Most notable was the unnamed “Party A,” which made a better, albeit only verbal, offer of $17 a share, compared to the final Tempus offer of $16.25, but brought significant baggage to the deal, including a high risk of antitrust issues.
That risk was so high that Party A offered Personalis a $200 million reverse termination fee should the deal collapse under regulatory scrutiny, a number that Personalis deemed inadequate after six weeks of negotiations.
To add more intrigue, at a pivotal July 20, 2026 meeting, Personalis’ board considered “the risk that Party A might not be committed to pursuing a transaction with Personalis, but rather was seeking to interfere with a sale to another third party.”
Here’s what the filing reveals about Party A and its offer:
It first approached Personalis in May 2024, with an initial offer of $3.75 per share, which doubled after six weeks of negotiations. (Later in 2026 the verbal offer rose to $17 per share.)
It only ever offered stock, never cash.
It was publicly traded as of May 2024 (likely ruling out Caris Life Sciences, which went public in 2025.)
In July 2024, an unnamed party had contacted Lightspeed Venture Partners about acquiring its approximately 15 percent stake in Personalis at a premium, potentially to gain control of the company through the open market. Personalis’ board appears to have believed at the time it was Party A.
After acquiring a stake in Personalis in 2024, Tempus raised the possibility of an outright acquisition in January 2026 at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Tempus’ offers quickly rose from $9 per share in April to $16.25 by July.
Party A re-emerged the chat in June 2026, with an oral offer of $1.5 billion, which kicked off an invitation from another unnamed “Party B;” however, Party A’s offer never came in writing and Party B withdrew on July 10.
On July 18, Personalis’ board deemed Tempus’s offer better. The matter will now be put to a vote by Personalis shareholders.
If any readers know anything about the potential identity of Party A or have more details on the sale process, let me know! Or throw your best guess at the identity of Party A in the comments.
Ion Genomics News
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Nautilus Biotechnology has abandoned its attempt to profile the entire proteome and “has shifted the majority of its R&D resources to the development of targeted assays,” as reported by Adam Bonislawski of GenomeWeb.
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Natera to Sponsor Breast Cancer Awareness 5Ks, Adds Angiex ADC Trial Collaboration
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Element Biosciences has announced the opening of pre-orders for its Cytos cell screening assays. It captures cell morphology, up to 20-plex protein expression, CRISPR guide-RNA sequence, and gene expression from the same cell during a run on its Aviti24 instrument. Options include Cytos optical pooled screening, multimodal pooled screening, and 3’ transcriptome.
On Aug. 18, Element appointed longtime Pfizer R&D executive Mikael Dolsten to its board of directors. It also appointed cofounder Matt Kellinger to senior VP of product strategy.
My Omics Reading List
Guo et al. “Integrative spatial profiling of 3D genome organization and gene expression in tissue.” Cell. Aug. 25, 2026.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania present a method that captures both 3D genome organization and gene expression from the same tissue section at near-single-cell resolution, combining a 2D spatial barcoding scheme to capture spatial information as well as in situ Hi-C and reverse transcription.
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Shi, L., Bao, W., Culhane, A.C. et al. “Ensuring multiomics data reproducibility for artificial intelligence with reference materials as a common calibrator.” Nature Biotechnology. Sept. 1, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-026-03267-1
An international team of researchers, including Weill Cornell Medicine’s Chris Mason, make the case for using reference materials to calibrate measurements from multiomics tools and assays as those data increasingly get fed to AI models. These models can interpret batch effects and other sources of technical variation as biological signals, which can confound later analyses.
“Within this framework, reproducibility shifts from a retrospective validation to a proactive design principle,” they wrote.
Elsewhere on the Internet
The official trailer for The Love Hypothesis movie has dropped. I’m glad they didn’t simply make the character of Adam Carlson British to sound smart, despite being played by British actor Tom Bateman. But he does sound like nearly every British actor playing American since Damien Lewis went gravelly voiced to play US Army soldier Richard Winters in Band of Brothers. The internet suggests that it was not actually filmed at Stanford University, where the book and movie are set, but at Concordia University in Montreal.