Welcome to Roche Foundation Medicine.

This site is not intended to provide medical advice and/or treatment guidance. It is produced by Roche as a partner of Foundation Medicine.

Please select an option:

Roche Singapore launches genomic profiling assay to guide personalized treatment decisions

November 21, 2018

By Healthcare Innovation Editors, Healthcare Innovation

Roche announced today that FoundationOne®CDx, Foundation Medicine’s comprehensive companion diagnostic test for personalized cancer care, has launched in Singapore. FoundationOne CDx supports clinicians in their decision-making by providing a clear, in-depth report that describes the unique genomic profile of a patient’s tumor as well as associated, approved therapies and relevant clinical trials. FoundationOne CDx is the next evolution of FoundationOne®, Foundation Medicine’s original laboratory-developed genomic profiling test. In the United States, the FoundationOne CDx platform has been reviewed and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, including analytical and clinical validation, and bioinformatics.

“The biggest advantage of next generation sequencing is that it can capture all the essential cancer biomarkers to help clinicians select the right therapy for patients in a single testing attempt, particularly when tumor samples are limited,” said Dr. Tay Miah Hiang, Senior Consultant Medical Oncologist at OncoCare Cancer Centre. In addition, with the increasing use of immunotherapy, Foundation Medicine is able to provide information about Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1), tumor mutational burden (TMB) and microsatellite instability (MSI) statuses that allow clinicians to identify patients who may benefit from the cancer immunotherapy.”

FoundationOne CDx includes an updated gene list, comprising all main classes of genomic alterations in 324 of the most commonly mutated genes known to drive the growth of cancer. The test also reports tumor mutational burden (TMB) and microsatellite instability, genomic signatures which can help inform cancer immunotherapy-based treatment decisions.1,2

“Upfront testing of TMB and additional biomarkers are beneficial to physicians, as they would have more information to guide their treatment selection and the patient would have access to more treatment options,” said Dr. Ravindran Kanesvaran, Assistant Professor, Senior Consultant in the Division of Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Centre Singapore, and Chair of the International Society of Geriatric Oncology task force for kidney cancer in the elderly.

[1] Hellman MD, et al. Nivolumab plus Ipilimumab in Lung Cancer with a High Tumor Mutational Burden. N Engl J Med. 2018; 378:2093-2104.

[2] Dudley JC, et al. Microsatellite Instability as a Biomarker for PD-1 Blockade. Clin Cancer Res. 2016; 22:813-20