Although it faced a setback earlier this month when regulators put the kibosh on its deal to acquire a rival company, genetic sequencing equipment maker Illumina will leave the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference with two new partnering deals under its belt.
The San Diego-based company and Swiss drug and diagnostics maker Roche said Monday that they had formed a partnership to increase availability of genomic testing to patients with cancers. The 15-year, non-exclusive partnership is meant to broaden adoption of distributable next-generation sequencing-based testing in oncology. Financial terms between Illumina and Roche were not disclosed.
In addition, Illumina partnered with Genomics England to offer whole-genome sequencing for up to 300,000 people over the next five years for the Genomic Medicine Service, part of England’s National Health Service, Genomics England said.
Under the agreement with Roche, Illumina will grant the company the right to develop and distribute in vitro diagnostic tests running on Illumina’s NextSeq 550Dx system and on future systems. Roche will also help develop new companion diagnostic claims for Illumina’s pan-cancer assay TruSight Oncology 500, also known as TSO 500, for drugs that Roche already markets and that are in its pipeline.
In an interview at JPM, Cindy Perettie, CEO of Roche-owned diagnostics firm Foundation Medicine, noted that the companion diagnostic claims would include Rozlytrek (entrectinib) and Alecensa (alectinib), which are respectively NTRK/ROS1 and ALK inhibitors that work by targeting genetic drivers of cancers.
Rozlytrek won Food and Drug Administration approval in August 2019 for any solid tumor that expresses an NTRK fusion and for ROS1-positive non-small cell lung cancer. Alecensa won approval in 2017 for ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer. Bayer’s Vitrakvi (larotrectinib) also targets NTRK, while other ALK inhibitors include Novartis’ Zykadia (ceritinib) and Pfizer’s Xalkori (crizotinib).
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“I’m seeing here at JPM just the amount of enthusiasm for targeted therapies, and that is the sweet spot for genomic profiling,” Foundation Medicine Chief Scientific Officer Priti Hegde said during the interview. “I think if these novel therapies take off, it opens up space for targets that were previously undruggable, but are molecularly driven, which is perfect for genomic tools.”
Roche is no stranger to next-generation sequencing. In June 2018, it paid $2.4 billion to acquire the remaining share of Foundation Medicine that it didn’t already own.
“This collaboration is uniquely positioned to improve medical value and clinical decision making globally by combining the unique capabilities of the Roche Group including Foundation Medicine with Illumina and will provide more patients with access to NGS to characterize their disease and identify the right treatment for them,” Roche Diagnostics CEO Thomas Schinecker said in a statement. “This builds upon our strategy of accelerating clinical research, streamlining workflows and expanding assay menus to broaden access to genomic data and lower barriers to routine use.”
With respect to the deal with Genomics England, the organization said the goal was to establish the country as a leader in the use of genome sequencing as a routine component of medical care. The NHS Genomic Medicine Service and others will provide the samples. There is also an option to deliver up to 500,000 genome equivalents.
On Jan. 3, Illumina said it would call off a deal to buy Pacific Biosciences of California for $1.2 billion after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission moved to block the deal. PacBio specializes in long-read sequencing, while Illumina’s focus is on short-read sequencing. Nevertheless, the FTC said the deal would have been anti-competitive.
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