CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Foundation Medicine, Inc. today announced the appointment of Sanket Agrawal as its Chief BioPharma Business Officer. Drawing on his deep biotech experience, he will lead and expand the company’s large and growing set of collaborations with biotech and pharmaceutical partners to support the development of innovative cancer treatments. Foundation Medicine currently works with more than 65 BioPharma companies who leverage Foundation Medicine’s genomic insights to support therapeutic discovery, development, and commercialization. This includes helping them to uncover promising avenues of research for new targeted therapies, designing more efficient clinical trials, identifying patients who may be eligible for those trials and companion diagnostic development.
“Our ambition is to serve as an essential partner to BioPharma organizations, helping them navigate the increasingly complex landscape of cancer care and research,” said Brian Alexander, MD, MPH, chief executive officer at Foundation Medicine. “Sanket brings significant industry experience, a biopharma customer’s perspective and a sense of urgency toward improving patient care. He is a purpose-driven leader with an exciting vision for how best to deliver solutions for our partners.”
Agrawal joins Foundation Medicine following an accomplished career at Amgen in R&D, commercial oncology, and as a general manager. Most recently he led the rapid development from Phase 1 through launch of Lumakras™ (sotorasib), the first approved targeted therapy for patients with non-small cell lung cancer driven by any KRAS mutation, a watershed moment in the field. He previously held leadership roles at Relsys (now Oracle Health Sciences), as well as at leading management consulting firms.
Leveraging his acute understanding of the therapeutic product lifecycle, Agrawal will be responsible for the development and expansion of partnerships that utilize Foundation Medicine’s robust and rapidly growing portfolio of biopharma solutions and database of more than half a million genomic profiles. These include comprehensive genomic profiling services to support biomarker discovery and patient enrollment into trials, analysis capabilities, insights from real world data to accelerate drug development, monitoring solutions, and companion diagnostic development. In collaboration with its BioPharma partners, Foundation Medicine has secured more than 60 companion diagnostic claims in the U.S. and Japan for its tissue- and liquid based comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) tests, each of which helps patients access the right therapy at the right time.
“We are on the cusp of incredible transformation in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer as we learn more about the biology of this disease and have access to large scale data insights,” said Agrawal. “I’m proud to join an organization that is leading this transformation and empowering the ecosystem of BioPharma companies to design and deliver better therapies for more patients living with cancer.”
About Foundation Medicine
Foundation Medicine is a molecular information company dedicated to a transformation in cancer care in which treatment is informed by a deep understanding of the genomic changes that contribute to each patient’s unique cancer. The company offers a full suite of comprehensive genomic profiling assays to identify the molecular alterations in a patient’s cancer and match them with relevant targeted therapies, immunotherapies and clinical trials. Foundation Medicine’s molecular information platform aims to improve day-to-day care for patients by serving the needs of clinicians, academic researchers and drug developers to help advance the science of molecular medicine in cancer. For more information, please visit www.FoundationMedicine.com or follow Foundation Medicine on Twitter (@FoundationATCG).
