Lester Poon: What Happened to Foundation Medicine?
Lester Poon, Precision Oncologist, Principal at What’s With Media, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Oncologists, why have you abandoned Foundation Medicine?
While deep diving into the Tempus AI and Caris Life Sciences earnings after their Q2 2025 results, I noticed that their combined solid tumor NGS volumes were between 60% – 65% of the total US market. This made me think…what about Foundation Medicine (FMI)?
When I started my career in the next-generation sequencing space, FMI was the comprehensive genomic profiling oncology leader. It was a big surprise for me to see that the tissue NGS testing volumes for FMI have been falling from 2019 to 2023, while Caris and Tempus volumes have increased during the same time.
Perhaps, FMI has been focusing on liquid biopsy NGS testing?
I was wrong…FMI liquid biopsy testing has been flat, while Guardant Health has grown.
What happened to FMI?
Since FMI is no longer public, I dug through the Roche annual reports, and was a bit sad to find out the following…
– 2022; Roche wrote off USD 122M of Product Intangible Asset related to FMI’s technology because…
‘The impairment was a result of increased competition and reduced sales expectations’
– 2023; Roche wrote off USD 644M of Goodwill related to the FMI acquisition because…
‘[…] no longer considered [FMI] a strategic transaction for the Pharmaceuticals Division’ and ‘there was no surplus from the estimated future revenues of the [FMI] business to support the carrying value of the goodwill, neither were there any significant future synergistic benefits to other products within the Pharmaceuticals Division.’
During my run-ins with FMI over the last 5 years, I consistently see them at oncology conferences, publish interesting studies, and expand CDx indications, which brings me back to my original question…
Why have oncologists abandoned Foundation Medicine?
Notes:
- Data for graphs are from data.cms.gov and reflect Medicare payments for services
- Preliminary analysis was done with ChatGPT agent mode”
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