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www.clinicalomics.com May/June 2017 Clinical OMICs 43 H3 Biomedicine and Foundation Medicine Extend Translational Medicine Partnership H3 Biomedicine, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company specializing in the discovery and development of precision cancer medicine, has announced plans to extend its collaboration with Foundation Medicine, a developer of genomic analysis diagnostics. The partnership, begun two years ago between the two Cambridge, MA-based companies, will include "interrogating Foundation Medicine's FoundationCORE dataset with the goal of expanding the translation of ongoing H3 programs and identifying new, actionable cancer drivers," H3 said in a news release. According to Foundation Medicine, FoundationCORE is one of the largest and most robust collections of common and rare clinical tumor profiles in the world. "Having access, through Foundation Medicine, to a high-quality, large-scale data-set for identification of novel driver events and clinical translation helps cre- ate a competitive edge for H3 within the current oncology drug development market," said Markus Warmuth, M.D., president and CEO of H3 Biomedicine. "The collaboration with Foundation Medicine has broadened the scope of our clinical programs and has pointed us in new, unique directions and we look for- ward to continuing this successful collaboration." Lihua Yu, chief data science officer at H3 said the genomics data in Founda- tionCORE is a better reflection of patients seeking treatment in current clinical practice than publicly available data sets. "This is not a static data snap shot," Yu said. "It's good to get data from patients who are getting treated." The partnership will involve "thorough computational analysis" to "connect genomic aberrations with disease context, which can directly impact the trajec- tory of our pipeline," Yu said. Ping Zhu, M.D., executive director of target discovery and genomics at H3 Bio- medicine, said the partnership with Foundation Medicine has "really empow- ered" H3's efforts. H3 Biomedicine is part of Tokyo-based Eisai a research-based healthcare company.—Diana Manos from C-Path, the Translational Genom- ics Research Institute ( TGen) Pathogen Genomics Division ( T-Gen North) will sequence nearly 12,000 TB bacteria iso- lates from around the world. "Working with TGen will allow us to bridge knowledge gaps critical for iden- tifying TB drug-resistance patterns, and ultimately help us to better treat patients," said Debra Hanna, Ph.D., Executive Direc- tor of CPTR, in a prepared statement. "With TGen's expertise in DNA sequenc- ing, we at C-Path can extract valuable data from existing clinical samples and make them available globally via the ReSeqTB data collaboration center." TGen North will use next generation sequencing technology to sequence the DNA of the isolates over the next three years, significantly augmenting the ReSeqTB database, which provides key data on TB drug resistance to research- ers worldwide. Identifying DNA markers associated with TB drug resistance will enable clinicians to more rapidly diagno- sis the disease and direct patients toward the best available treatments for their particular strain of bacteria. "TB can quickly develop resistance to treatments, even multiple-drug resis- tance. And the degree and type of drug resistance varies from place to place," said David Engelthaler, Ph.D., associate professor and co-director of TGen North. "We need better ways to determine which patients should receive which specific drugs to address their infection. The ultimate goal is a more personalized, and effective, approach to treating this disease." n selvanegra / Getty Images vitanovski / Getty Images (continued from previous page) Tuberculosis bacillus in the lung.