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Delivering genomics to routine care
April 2012
EDIT CONNECT
SHARING OPTIONS:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Foundation Medicine Inc., a molecular
information company that touts its ability to bring
"comprehensive cancer
genomic analysis to routine clinical care," announced in March a collaboration
with Array BioPharma, headquartered in Boulder, Colo. In this collaborative
effort, Foundation
Medicine will use its genomic sequencing and analytic
capabilities to assess potentially relevant molecular alterations and thus
assist Array in
identifying patients who are most likely to respond to
treatment.
Array has a portfolio of targeted cancer agents
that are in
the early stages of clinical development, and through this collaboration with
Foundation Medicine, Array seeks to determine the genetic
profile of tumors of
patients who are treated with certain anticancer agents in its pipeline. The
ultimate goal is to increase knowledge about how to
identify patients who may
respond to a given targeted therapy and ensure that each patient gets the
optimal drug to treat his or her individual
disease.
"Foundation Medicine has established a remarkable portfolio
of collaborations around
the discovery and clinical development of targeted
cancer therapeutics," said Dr. Michael J. Pellini, president and CEO of Foundation Medicine, in the news release about the deal. "The molecular information generated by our platform is designed to help biopharma companies like Array expedite the development of targeted drug candidates that impact the genomic pathways driving a specific cancer." It's a good pairing of partners because Foundation
Medicine's industry and academic partnerships will complement Array's core
cancer
diagnostics capability, which is a comprehensive cancer genomic test
that provides physicians with genomic information to help match patients with
treatments or clinical trials specific for the genomic profile of their tumor,
Pellini tells ddn via email, echoing a
similar point made in
the official announcement.
But looking at the bigger picture and Foundation Medicine's
capabilities both in this deal and with respect to past and future
collaborations, Pellini tells ddn that
his company's "fully informative
genomic profile capability is helping partners
to better understand the molecular basis of their clinical trials'
participants' cancer in order to
conduct clinical trials more quickly and
efficiently. It enables the partner to better stratify patients for the trials,
to seek out better ways to
identify responders and non-responders, to identify
why certain patients might have adverse reactions, etc. Potentially we can
develop companion
diagnostics and help partners match the right patients with
the right drug."
Foundation
Medicine's comprehensive cancer genomic test uses
next-generation sequencing to analyze routine clinical specimens—typically,
small amounts of
formalin fixed, paraffin embedded tumor tissue—for molecular
alterations in approximately 200 cancer-related genes.
The test is optimized for clinical-grade analysis of tumor
tissues, reportedly overcoming multiple complexities—including
purity, ploidy
and clonality—inherent to tumor genomes. Test results are reported through a
secure, interactive web site linking genomic data to a
structured knowledge
base of relevant, publicly available scientific and medical information.
Foundation Medicine also aims to provide information on
relevant clinical
trials to enable a more rapid recruitment of patients into trials for targeted
therapies.
According to the company, its test also is designed to
accommodate "a broad landscape of cancer genome information and a growing
repertoire of targeted treatments and clinical research opportunities."
Foundation Medicine, Dana-Farber identify genomic
alterations in lung, colorectal
cancer
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Foundation Medicine Inc. also recently
announced that the
company and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute published results
in
Nature Medicine from their
collaborative
next-generation sequencing (NGS) study to assay cancer-relevant
genes in 24 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and 40 colorectal cancer (CRC)
cases.
In the study, 59 percent of the samples were found to have
genomic alterations directly associated
with a clinically available targeted
therapeutic or a relevant clinical trial of a targeted therapy. Two novel gene
fusions, KIF5B-RET in NSCLC and
C2orf44-ALK in CRC, were discovered among the
potentially drugable alterations identified in the study.
Both of these findings may expand
therapeutic options for a
subset of cancer patients, according to the collaborators. Further, they say
the publication demonstrates that using targeted
NGS to profile patient tumors
for molecular alterations associated with therapeutic responses may have an
important clinical impact in cancer
treatment.
"In this collaboration, we detected clinically-relevant
genomic alterations in more than
half of the samples profiled, and because
Foundation Medicine's NGS assay detects all classes of alterations with
clinical-grade sensitivity, this
research was able to identify both expected as
well as completely novel alterations," says Dr. Maureen Cronin, senior vice
president of research and
product development at Foundation Medicine, and co-author
of the study. "The discovery of novel rearrangements and fusions, such as
KIF5B-RET and
C2orf44-ALK, supports an important role for NGS in the clinical
understanding and treatment of cancer."
"In a common indication like NSCLC, identifying even a small
subpopulation of individuals with gene fusions who may be responsive to a
targeted therapy has the potential for major therapeutic impact," explains Dr.
Phil Stephens, executive director of cancer genomics at Foundation
Medicine,
and a co-author of the study. "This joint research with Dana-Farber translates
genomic research to the clinic and we expect that it may
quickly have a positive
impact for patients." Code: E041219 Back |
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