OneOncology, Foundation Medicine Create Partnership to Deliver Targeted Care

OneOncology, a network of nearly 170 community oncology care sites, and cancer genomic profiling firm Foundation Medicine said Monday they are partnering to give patients and physicians access to genomic profiling tools as well as expanded research opportunities.

“Our goal is to offer comprehensive genomic profiling to all patients who might potentially benefit from it," said Lee Schwartzberg, M.D., chief medical officer at OneOncology, in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care®, adding, "knowing their genomic landscape will be very helpful to inform treatment decisions in multiple lines of therapy."

The initiative willl allow for one analytic platform where clinicians could search and identify patients with genomic alterations that make them eligible to participate in certain clinical trials, he said. The database will allow the community oncology practices to get patients into targeted therapy trials, particularly in cases where there are "tissue agnostic" alterations and mutations that exist across different cancers.

In addition, Schwartzberg said, OneOncology will help Foundation Medicine to create new assays for community oncology practices.

“Through this partnership, we have the opportunity to design studies from the patients’ perspective and create rapid learning environments to advance patient care,” Brian Alexander, MD, MPH, chief medical officer at Foundation Medicine, in a statement. “This is particularly important for diseases for which there is no standard of care where we need to learn and test hypotheses in new ways.”

In other words, Schwartzberg noted, not every mutation is actionable now, but may be in the future, and that is where the database comes in, he said. As new drugs get developed, it is necessary to know where they can have an impact, citing, for example, HER2-positive alterations, which are expressed in different cancers.

"There's an increasing number of these," he said.