Roche is handing over $595 million to bolster its Foundation Medicine business with a deal to snap up SAGA Diagnostics.
Through the deal, the Swiss major gets it hands on Saga’s Pathlight, a personalized, tumor-informed molecular residual disease (MRD) platform.
This platform uses structural variant biology, enabling it to be ultra-sensitive in picking up a range of cancers.
Saga has already commercialized the platform in early breast cancer, as well as colorectal cancer. The company has previously guided to a sales target of around $150 million in 2028 sales.
The idea behind the deal is to “strengthen Foundation Medicine’s portfolio of high-quality diagnostic tests and solutions that support treatment selection, and the monitoring of both treatment response and disease recurrence,” according to an April 17 statement from Roche.
Foundation will also tap Roche’s existing Axelios sequencing platform and the Digital LightCycler PCR platform to “develop a decentralized MRD solution which will enable patient access in healthcare settings worldwide.”
In an April 17 note, analysts at Jefferies said Foundation “gains an asset that we view as attractive from a technical performance standpoint, while Roche’s scale across therapy selection could boost SAGA’s scale … and commercial presence.”
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Saga spun out of Lund University in Sweden in 2016 with the goal of quantifying aberrations in DNA, RNA and strands of ctDNA in patients’ bloodstreams by using massive parallel sequencing and digital PCR.
Its sequencing tech can detect mutant allele fractions as low as 0.001%—representing the number of mutant or variant reads compared to the total amount—making it more accurate than other PCR and next-generation sequencing methods.
