Foundation Medicine adds new immunotherapy features to its gene profiling products
pharmafile | August 23, 2016 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development | FoundationOne, oncology, tumour
Foundation Medicine hopes to enhance oncologist insight into potential immunotherapy responses with the addition of new clinical markers to its FoundationOne and FoundationOne Heme products.
The firm is adding the ability to determine Tumour Mutational Burden (TMB) and Microsatellite Instability MSI) from its assays in addition to the comprehensive profiling of genes provided by the two products.
According to findings put forward at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) this year, TMB measures the number of DNA mutations per megabase in a tumour sequence, which can help to determine the likelihood of response to cancer immunotherapies. High TMB can be a result of defective mismatch repair of DNA, known as MSI-high or MSI-high tumours.
“Cancer immunotherapies are at the forefront of cancer treatment, and new, quantitative approaches are needed to predict clinical responses to this important, but also expensive, class of therapies,” comments Vincent Miller, chief medical officer of Foundation Medicine. “Prior to our ability to measure TMB and MSI with FoundationOne, these biomarkers could only be detected separately, either through tests such as immunohistochemistry, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or whole exome sequencing. Importantly, high-quality, predictive TMB scoring can only be accurately performed with sophisticated algorithms developed to work with broad, hybrid capture-based platforms that can analyze all relevant alterations simultaneously. Integrating this capability to measure TMB and MSI with one tissue sample, and reported in one test, represents an important advance in clinical care.”
Thomas George, GI oncology program director at the University of Florida, remarks: “The ability to accurately measure multiple biomarkers simultaneously, including TMB and MSI, is an important advance for the field of cancer immunotherapy, and one that is unique to Foundation Medicine. Foundation Medicine’s combination of advanced sequencing platforms and highly-specific algorithms gives me access to all relevant genomic biomarkers for my patients at once, helping to save both time and tissue.”
“We were encouraged by the findings presented at ASCO, including the possibility of identifying patients more likely to benefit from checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy,” Miller continues. “Our goal is to empower doctors and patients with a full range of relevant, actionable genomic information, and we’re excited to offer our distinctive solution to estimate TMB and MSI simultaneously and with exceptional accuracy, supported by sophisticated algorithms and rooted in contextual insights from our knowledgebase FoundationCore. This is something no other next-generation sequencing platform offers.”
Matt Fellows
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