Foundation Medicine
Foundation Medicine offers two tests to help cancer patients and their physicians identify targeted treatment based on patient’s unique genomic profile. The company uses information-based approach to identify treatment options for patients by using comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP). The platform derives revenue by selling their tests to physicians and biopharmaceutical companies. The number of available targeted therapies has been expanding rapidly. However, by the time a drug is on the market, there is normally only information available about the drug’s efficiency in one or a limit set of cancer types. Thus despite the large number of targeted therapies available over all, there is a smaller set available for each cancer type. Foundation Medicine expands the pool of available therapies to patients with all cancer types by analyzing the genetic profile of patient’s cancer types and matching with all existing targeted therapies.
Foundation medicine currently offer for assays. In 2012, Foundation Medicine launched FoundationOne which is used for solid tumors. In 2013, the company launched FoundationOne Heme for blooed-based cancers, or hematologic malignancies, including leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, pediatric cancers, and advanced sarcomas. In May last year, the company launched FoundationACT-Assay for Circulation Tumor DNA, which is a blood-based assay to evaluate circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). Tumors that circulates in the blood plasma outside of cells shed DNA, which is captured and analyzed by this assay. In December last year, the company further marketed FoundationFocurs CDx BRCA.
Based on Foundation Medicine’s estimate, there are approximately 1.1 million patients with newly diagnosed or recurrent metastatic cancer and there is significant unmet need for these patients. Foundation Medicine has a significant first mover advantage being the first commercially available molecular information platform that comprehensively assesses all cancer-related genes. FoundationOne currently assess 315 biologically relevant cancer genes for all classes of genomic alterations. FoundationOne Heme analyzes an additional 265 RNA sequences and 406 DNA sequences.
Through these products, Foundation Medicine has built a comprehensive genomic profiling platform with computational biology and information technology capabilities to analyze clinical trial patient samples. These products help patients assess their genomic profile, which can be further used in future research. In this way, the information collected from patients allow Foundation Medicine to derive value from pharmaceutical companies.
Moreover, Foundation Medicine partners with leading technology and software companies such as Flatiron Health, Clinical Outcomes and Tracking Anlysis (COTA) to build a broader data platform. Together with Flatiron, Foundation Medicine launched a clinico-genomic database of 20,000 linked clinic-genomic records. This database will help scientists and physicians to further accelerate their drug development programs for targeted cancer therapy. Together with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Foundation Medicine formed collaborative data exchange programs. In 2016, foundation medicine contributed 18,000 genomic profiles of adult cancers to the NCI Genomics Data Commons portal. In 2016, as part of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, Foundation Medicine released a dataset of pediatric genomic profiles to promote the research in pediatric cancer diseases. Through these efforts, Foundation Medicine promotes discovery of more targeted therapies which will enlarge Foundation Medicine’s treatment database.
