New Applications for Genomic Profiling of Advanced Cancer to Be Presented at Oncology Meeting

New Applications for Genomic Profiling of Advanced Cancer to Be Presented at Oncology Meeting

Massachusetts-based Foundation Medicine will present new data revealing comprehensive genomic profiling with FoundationOne in a variety of advanced cancers in two oral presentations, six poster discussions, and 18 poster presentations at the upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting 2016 June 3-7 in Chicago.

Foundation Medicine’s FoundationOne is a fully informative genomic profile that identifies alterations in all genes known to be altered in human solid cancers, complementing the traditional treatment decision tools and matching each patient with targeted therapies based on their genomic alterations. The new data to be presented at the ASCO meeting also shows that FoundationOne may be helpful to predict patients’ responses to a number of immuno-oncology agents in a variety of cancers, including colorectal, skin, lung, and bladder cancers.

The two oral presentations will reveal data on response markers to anti-PD1/PD-L1 therapies, a pathway that when activated suppresses the immune system’s ability to fight cancer cells.

The first presentation, “PD-L1 Expression, Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Subtype and Mutational Load are Independent Predicators of Response to Atezolizumab (atezo) in Metastatic Urothelial Carcinoma (mUC; Imvigor210),” will be given by Jonathan E. Rosenberg, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Rosenberg will show results from an evaluation of biomarkers of clinical benefit of anti-PD-L1 agents (atezolizumab) in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma, revealing not only that the expression of PD-L1 in patient samples is associated with drug response but that the TCGA cancer subtype and the amount of mutations in these patients had predictive value to immune responsiveness.

Atezalizumab (Tecentriq) has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for patients with advanced bladder cancer, and the new results will reveal the potential of comprehensive genomic profiling to predict responses to Tecentriq in bladder cancer patients.

The second oral presentation, “Hybrid Capture-Based Next Generation Sequencing (HC NGS) in Melanoma Identifies Markers of Response to Anti-PD1/PD-L1,” will be given by Douglas Buckner Johnson, MD, MSCI, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. The researchers addressed whether the number and/or type of mutations correlated with outcomes to agents blocking PD-1/PD-L1 in melanoma, and found that the mutational load stratifies patients by likelihood of response.

Data on the potential applications of comprehensive genomic profiling will also be shown for breast, lung, thyroid, prostate, penile, and colorectal cancers, as well as for neuroendocrine carcinoma, carcinoma of unknown primary, and acute myeloid leukemia.