Tempus AI: Liquid Biopsy Pricing Set to Hit $7,000-$8,000, Adding $250-300 Million in Annual Revenue as ADLT Approval Nears
Morgan Stanley 24th Annual Global Healthcare Conference, September 15, 2026 — CEO Eric Lefkofsky details Personalis acquisition logic, the Merck-Moderna vaccine sequencing win, and confidence in sustained 25%-plus growth
Tempus AI founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky used his appearance at Morgan Stanley's healthcare conference to lay out a revenue upside case for the company's liquid biopsy franchise that is meaningfully larger than the market had been modeling, while also providing the fullest public explanation yet of the logic behind the Personalis acquisition and the company's role in Merck and Moderna's melanoma vaccine rollout.
Liquid biopsy pricing upside larger than expected
The most consequential disclosure centered on ADLT pricing dynamics for Tempus's xF liquid biopsy assay, which is currently under FDA review. Lefkofsky said the company had previously modeled pricing in the $5,000 to $6,000 range once approval and Medicare's Advanced Diagnostic Laboratory Test designation came through. That assumption has now moved higher after Guardant Health signaled it expects ADLT pricing north of $8,000 for a comparably sized assay that recently won approval. "We had historically thought that assay would be priced at, let's say, $5,000 or $6,000, but now it looks like it will be priced closer to $7,000 or $8,000," Lefkofsky said, adding that the shift should add roughly $250 million to $300 million of annual revenue once approval lands, expected sometime in the back half of 2027.
That upside sits alongside a more immediate catalyst already locked in: Tempus's solid tumor assay, xT, recently won FDA approval for its tumor-only configuration, complementing an earlier tumor-normal approval. Because tumor-only volume represents more than half of solid tumor testing, the full platform migrates to ADLT pricing of $4,500 effective January 1, up from a list price of $2,923. Lefkofsky pegged the annual revenue and margin benefit at $80 million to $100 million. Combined, the two pricing catalysts represent well over $300 million of incremental high-margin revenue over the next 18 months, a dynamic Lefkofsky argued is underappreciated in the current narrative around the stock.
Personalis: deal economics flipped, timeline accelerated by a rival bid
Lefkofsky offered a candid account of why Tempus decided to acquire Personalis, a company it has distributed exclusively for several years under an arrangement that had favored Tempus financially. "We were getting paid about $400 per test. They weren't getting paid and they didn't have reimbursement approved. And so it was just in our favor," he said. That dynamic began to shift once Personalis secured MolDX coverage for lung, breast and, most recently, immuno-oncology indications, putting the company on a path where its own ASPs would soon exceed what it was paying Tempus in distribution fees. Tempus began acquisition talks, but the process was compressed after a third party made a competing offer, pulling forward a deal Lefkofsky said might otherwise have closed toward year-end or into 2026.
He was blunt about the stock trading above the announced deal price in the secondary market, calling it illogical given that Tempus, Merck and ARK Invest collectively represent a large enough voting bloc to make a topping bid unlikely to succeed. "There's no kind of rationale to be buying their stock at a significant price above where it's going to close," he said, characterizing any arbitrage attempt around the deal's exchange ratio as "riddled with risk."
On the divergence between Personalis's own 2030 revenue projection of $758 million in the S-4 filing versus Tempus's more conservative $333 million estimate, Lefkofsky attributed the gap almost entirely to differing ASP assumptions rather than unit growth, noting Tempus "just don't feel any reason to kind of like be overly aggressive" with its own numbers — an admission that leaves room for upside surprise post-close.
Merck-Moderna melanoma vaccine: sequencing embedded in the manufacturing process
Lefkofsky detailed Tempus's win of the national sequencing partner role for the Merck-Moderna V940 melanoma vaccine program, a contract awarded independently of the Personalis relationship following a competitive RFP that he said included Illumina's oncology unit among other bidders. He framed the structural significance of the win as unusual within diagnostics: "It's really the first time that I'm aware of where the sequencing is actually a component of the manufacturing process and product... Here, if we don't sequence you, you can't get the drug." Unlike a typical companion diagnostic arrangement, where multiple labs can perform equivalent testing, Merck and Moderna require Tempus specifically to sequence patients as part of the regulated manufacturing chain, creating a durable and exclusive revenue stream tied to a therapy Lefkofsky expects to expand into additional tumor types beyond melanoma. He declined to size the total opportunity, citing uncertainty around how broader trials will read out, but said his expectation is that the program becomes "quite big."
Data licensing business accelerating on AI infrastructure spending
Tempus's data licensing segment grew approximately 36% last quarter, and the company has now booked more than $100 million of total contract value in each of the past three quarters, including roughly $200 million in the most recent period. Lefkofsky tied the acceleration directly to biopharma's broader migration toward AI-driven R&D infrastructure. "Every time you turn around, they're announcing a deal to bring in NVIDIA chips or cut a deal with Anthropic or OpenAI for inference and compute. We're the fuel that makes a lot of that spend intelligent," he said. He described current oncology-only trend-line growth as sustainable at roughly 30% annually for five to ten years, with further upside if hyperscalers such as Google, OpenAI or Anthropic begin licensing multimodal health data at scale to train foundation models — a scenario he said would dwarf pharma's own spending capacity on data licensing.
On competitive threats to the data franchise, Lefkofsky was dismissive, noting that rivals including ConcertAI, Flatiron and Foundation Medicine have each attempted to build comparable data businesses over five-to-seven-year periods with limited traction. "This competition isn't affecting, on any level, our growth rate or the kind of proprietary fuel driving that growth rate," he said, pointing to the operational complexity of harmonizing molecular, pathology and radiology data across thousands of hospital relationships as the real barrier to entry.
Hereditary testing distortion from Invitae bankruptcy finally lapping
Lefkofsky provided a clearer accounting of the volatility in Tempus's hereditary testing business, acquired via Ambry Genetics roughly 18 months ago. Growth rates that spiked to 30-40% several quarters ago were largely a one-time function of volume shifting from Invitae following its bankruptcy, not organic acceleration, a distortion the company is only now lapping. "We tried to call out that it felt one-time to us," he said, adding that growth should normalize to a mid-teens range — roughly 12% to 18% — by the end of the current quarter as comparisons ease. Separately, he flagged a large latent demand opportunity in hereditary testing: current industry volume runs around 2 million tests annually against coverage policies that support roughly 70 million eligible tests, a gap he attributed to a bottleneck in genetic counselor capacity rather than reimbursement.
Margin trajectory: commercial payers still underpaying
Lefkofsky reiterated that commercial payers remain well below appropriate reimbursement levels for genomic profiling relative to Medicare and Medicaid, a view he said is shared across the group including Guardant and Natera. He suggested that as commercial reimbursement normalizes upward over time, margins for leading diagnostics providers could reach unusually high levels before eventually settling back down over a much longer horizon. "I would not be shocked if over the next decade you see margins in the 80% range," he said, though he cautioned that a 25-year view would likely see margins normalize closer to 60%.