NEW YORK – Foundation Medicine announced on Thursday that it is participating in the National Cancer Institute's Combination Therapy Platform Trial with Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (ComboMATCH) initiative to test new oncology therapy combinations.
Providers at a participating ComboMATCH clinical site can use FoundationOne CDx testing results to determine patient eligibility for ComboMATCH treatment trials. Foundation is one of nearly 40 participating designated laboratories, the Roche subsidiary noted in a statement. FoundationOne CDx is a next-generation sequencing-based test that detects substitutions, insertion and deletion alterations, and copy number alterations in 324 genes and select gene rearrangements, along with genomic signatures such as microsatellite instability and tumor mutational burden.
The initiative intends to identify promising treatments that can advance to more definitive clinical trials outside of ComboMATCH and improve patient outcomes, and each selected drug combination has strong preclinical or clinical evidence that it may be more effective than either of the single drugs alone.
Foundation Medicine was previously involved in the NCI's MATCH study that evaluated the benefit of genomically guided treatments targeting specific alterations within a patient's tumor, regardless of cancer type.
"We believe this next step in our ongoing collaboration with NCI will inform more targeted treatment options for advanced, complex cancer cases and is critical in understanding molecular insights to build the next level of cancer treatment," Foundation Medicine Chief Medical Officer Mia Levy said in a statement.