Foundation Medicine has added a couple more big names to its roster of investors and partners. The Cambridge, MA-based company, seeking to develop personalized cancer diagnostics based on new understanding of genomics, said today it has added Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures to a Series A financing that now totals $33.5 million.
Boston’s Third Rock Ventures incubated the company and led the company’s original $25 million Series A round that was announced back in April 2010. Besides adding cash, Foundation is picking up more expertise for its board from Kleiner partner Brook Byers—a longtime champion of personalized medicine—and Google’s Krishna Yeshwant.
The new financing for Foundation Medicine comes on the heels of a busy year, in which the company has presented some preliminary data at medical meetings, hired a new CEO in GE Healthcare vet Michael Pellini, and struck partnerships with Celgene (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CELG]]) and Novartis. The idea for the company is to come up with a more comprehensive analysis of an individual cancer patient’s tumor to see what combinations of mutations might be driving the malignancy, and, therefore, which treatments might have the best chance of working for the individual. The effort is based on the tools of next-generation DNA sequencing, which has made it possible to sequence entire human genomes for less than $4,000.
