Foundation Medicine and New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center are partnering to co-develop a new molecular diagnostic intended to match patients with blood cancers to targeted therapies or clinical trials, the organizations said today.

Through this collaboration, leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma specialists at Sloan-Kettering will provide clinical and genomic expertise to assist in product development. The resulting test will be based on technology, methods, and computational algorithms developed by Foundation Medicine, which intends to commercialize the test internationally, the company said.

“The development of clinical-grade sequencing is rapidly changing the practice of oncology, enabling us to more precisely understand and target the genomic alterations that drive a patient’s individual cancer,” Sloan-Kettering President and CEO Craig Thompson said in a statement. “We are partnering with Foundation Medicine to develop a best-in-class assay for hematologic cancers because we view achieving this goal as an extension of our mission as a comprehensive cancer center: making it possible for all patients to be treated with the therapy that is matched with their individual cancer.”

Foundation Medicine said this product in development complements its FoundationOne™ test, which produces a genomic profile for solid tumors and a concise report to help clinicians match patients with targeted drugs or clinical trials best suited to the patient. This new product, however, uses both DNA and RNA sequencing to identify genomic alterations characteristic of hematologic malignancies. The firm added that it expects to launch the new test by year-end.

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