Foundation Medicine Majority Stake Acquired by Roche for $1.03b

January 12, 2015 | Roche announced this morning that it has acquired a majority stake in Foundation Medicine. Roche will tender approximately $780m for 56.3% of the company and make an additional $250m investment by acquiring newly-issued shares for a total investment of $1.03 billion.

According to the announcement, the partnership is to include a broad R&D collaboration with the potential for more than $150m funding by Roche to accelerate Foundation Medicine’s new product development initiatives, optimize treatments for oncology patients, and better design and understand the results of clinical trials based on molecular information, as well as commercial collaboration agreements aimed at expanding the global sales efforts for Foundation Medicine’s current and future products.

Foundation Medicine will continue to operate independently and president and CEO Michael Pellini will continue to lead Foundation. (See, Laying the Foundation for Next-Gen Cancer Diagnostics)

Last week, Foundation published a paper in Clinical Cancer Research with researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center seeking to show that NGS tests offered actionable treatment guidance for cancer cases.

Yesterday the company announced preliminary financial results for 2014: $61.1 million in total revenue for the full year, a 111% increase over 2013 earnings. A total of 24,271 FoundationOne clinical tests were reported to ordering physicians for the full year ended December 31, 2014, a 167% increase over the 9,095 tests reported in 2013.

This is the second major Roche acquisition in the past month. In December, Roche acquired Bina Technologies’ genome analysis platform for an undisclosed sum.