Foundation Medicine Acquires Lexent Bio to Expand Liquid Bio

Roche subsidiary Foundation Medicine announced Friday it has acquired precision oncology firm Lexent Bio to help expand its liquid biopsy platforms and advance cancer care.

Financial and other details of the deal were not disclosed.

Lexent Bio's monitoring platform is currently in development and based on low-pass whole-genome sequencing and DNA methylation analysis, which Foundation said in a statement complements its current partnerships to develop advanced diagnostics and genomically evaluate disease progression to inform treatment decisions at earlier disease stages. 

In November, San Francisco-based Lexent announced a partnership with Illumina to develop its Confera Dx assay, a next-generation sequencing-based kit for monitoring response to therapy or minimal residual disease in patients with certain solid tumors, to run on Illumina's NextSeq 550Dx system.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Foundation Medicine said it plans to further incorporate both whole-genome sequencing and DNA methylation into new test platforms as a way to support treatment decision-making across all stages of disease. Methylation analysis can help oncologists identify patients at high risk of disease progression. 

The new technology will support development of targeted therapies from discovery research to clinical development, Foundation said.