Boston area where the DNA from patients’ tumor samples will be sequenced. With the resulting data, the firm will use its internal expertise in genomics and cancer biology to highlight which genetic variants are present in the tumor and their implications on treatment options. (Borisy declined to say how much the service would cost, but he did indicate that it would not cost tens of thousands of dollars.) The company plans to provide reports on its findings to oncologists and its other customers, who can access the information on a secure website that protects the information from unauthorized viewers. The physician could then use the information to make treatment decisions, or a pharmaceutical company could use the data to decide which patients to include in a clinical trial.
In the past, it would have been difficult to make treatment decisions based on sequenced cancer DNA due to a lack of knowing the roles of many genes. But that’s rapidly changing. The National Institutes of Health announced in September that it’s spending $275 million from agency budgets and federal stimulus funding to map 20 different cancer genomes over the next two years, in a program called The Cancer Genome Atlas. (In fact, one of Foundation Medicine’s founding academic advisors, Matthew Meyerson, is one of the lead researchers involved in The Cancer Genome Atlas.)
There’s already been growing use of genetic tests to guide cancer therapy. Redwood City, CA-based Genomic Health (NASDAQ:[[ticker:GHDX]]), for example, reported that its annual revenue rose from $110.6 million in 2008 to $149.5 million last year, based on a 35-percent jump in sales of its genetic test to predict which patients with breast cancer would likely benefit from chemotherapy. A number of startups in the Boston area such as Immuneering, Predictive Biosciences, and On-Q-ity are also developing ways to match patients with appropriate cancer drugs.
“I think people are on board with the concept of personalized medicine,” says Ben Zeskind, the founder and CEO of Cambridge-based Immuneering, which uses computer models to simulate interactions between drugs and patients’ immune cells to predict whether they would benefit from certain drugs for cancer or other diseases. “The future of fighting disease is going to be about targeting therapies very specifically to the patient and to a likely response [to therapies].”
There also are plenty of high-profile people who agree with the way Foundation Medicine is approaching this opportunity. The company’s board of directors includes Third Rock partners Mark Levin and Robert Tepper, the former CEO and chief scientist at Millennium (now called Millennium: the Takeda Oncology Company), Borisy, and David Schenkein, the chief executive of the Cambridge-based cancer drug developer Agios Pharmaceuticals, who was previously a leader of cancer drug research at the biotech powerhouse Genentech. The scientific advisors are Lander, a founding director at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Todd Golub, a Broad Institute founder who also researches cancer genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Matthew Meyerson, director of Dana-Farber’s Center for Cancer Genome Discovery; and Levi Garraway, a member of Dana-Farber’s Center for Cancer Genome Discovery.
This is a lot of brainpower and experience behind Foundation Medicine. And the firm now has money in the bank to grow its operations, which are expected to include 30 to 40 employees by the end of the year, according to Borisy. Still, the company is going to have to prove the utility of its approach to get health insurers to provide reimbursements for its service, and to make sequencing the genomes of individual patients’ tumors a routine part of treating cancer.
