Roche’s Foundation Medicine is deepening its longstanding ties with Bristol Myers Squibb as the companies team up on a new target.
The new pact, the financial terms of which were not disclosed, will see the companies develop Foundation Medicine’s diagnostic tool FoundationOne CDx to identify patients with homozygous MTAP deletion.
This will be “across multiple indications for an investigational targeted therapy,” Bristol Myers Squibb said in an April 22 statement, but the company gave no further details.
This homozygous deletion of MTAP occurs in around 10% to 15% of all human cancers.
“Homozygous MTAP deletion is a critical biomarker, yet one that can be difficult to detect without an assay that unveils blind spots others interpret as noise,” Troy Schurr, chief commercial officer at Foundation Medicine, said in a statement.
Accurately locating this deletion can help identify patients for targeted therapies and better match them with Bristol Myers Squibb’s experimental drug.
The pair’s original pact dates back to 2017, when they teamed up on a platform to find predictive biomarkers in cancer and immunotherapy agents. In 2023, the collaboration expanded when the companies worked on a companion diagnostic for Augtyro, the now-approved cancer drug.
