Foundation Medicine raises $33.5M in expanded Series A

Cambridge, MA-based cancer diagnostics firm Foundation Medicine has closed an expanded Series A financing, bringing the total raised in the round to $33.5 million. Investors included Third Rock Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Google Ventures. Concurrent with the financing, Brook Byers, partner, KPCB, and Krishna Yeshwant, partner, Google Ventures, will join the company's board of directors.

Foundation began operations last year with $25 million in financing led by Third Rock. The company has used the proceeds to develop clinical laboratory tests to analyze tumor genomic and other molecular information in individual patients' cancers. And Big Pharma and Biotech have taken notice. Foundation has already inked a collaboration with Novartis ($NVS) to develop and optimize its cancer genome panel test for the pharma giant's needs. Foundation also inked an agreement through which its test would be used to identify those patients most likely to respond to Celgene's ($CELG) drug candidates.

"We see a significant market opportunity for Foundation Medicine's cancer diagnostic test. Foundation Medicine is proactively addressing the growing need for physicians to assimilate and make decisions on large amounts of complex data in an intuitive and accurate manner," Yeshwant explains in a statement. "We look forward to partnering closely with the Foundation Medicine team as the company develops their test, which will ultimately contribute to improved patient healthcare."

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