Foundation Medicine is expanding and extending its long-standing collaboration with Novartis to through at least September 2016. The goal of the partnership—the pilot program which was established in January 2011 and expanded to three years in June 2012—is to provide genomic profiling analysis and molecular information in support of several of Novartis’ clinical oncology programs.
The firms say that the genomic profiling Foundation Medicine provided generated data that was clinically relevant enough that Novartis is now regularly using it in its oncology trials. This new agreement, the firms says, includes committed capacity for Foundation Medicine to provide genomic profiling of patient samples from Novartis’ clinical trials and access to Foundation Medicine’s analysis services and molecular information. Novartis also has the option to extend the term for an additional two-year period under the new three-year agreement.
Novartis isn’t the only firm interested in Foundation Medicine’s genomic profiling capabilities: Earlier this year, Foundation Medicine inked agreements with both Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Agios Pharmaceuticals in two separate agreements, both of which involved using Foundation Medicine’s genomic profiling expertise to develop new diagnostics for cancer. The firm’s clinical assays—FoundationOne™ for solid tumors and FoundationOne Heme for hematologic malignancies, sarcomas, and pediatric cancers—are each designed to provide a genomic profile to help identify individual molecular alterations within patients to match them with the therapies best suited for them.