• Cambridge, MA–based Foundation Medicine announced that it will “enter into a broad strategic collaboration” with Roche, giving the Swiss pharmaceutical giant an ownership stake in the company of up to 56%. Roche's total investment will exceed $1 billion. Foundation Medicine develops assays to determine molecular alterations in a patient's cancer and match them with targeted therapies and clinical trials.

  • Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, UT, is giving up efforts to prevent other companies from offering tests for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, bringing several lawsuits to an end. Myriad has reached settlements with LabCorp, Invitae, and Pathway Genomics and is in talks with Ambry, Quest Diagnostics, GeneDx, and Counsyl.

  • The American Lung Association released its 13th annual “State of Tobacco Control” report, which concluded that little happened on the state or federal levels in 2014 to reduce tobacco use (see www.stateoftobaccocontrol.org). No state passed a comprehensive smoke-free law or significantly increased tobacco taxes, and no state earned an “A” grade for providing access to quit-smoking treatments.

  • A published analysis found that many women with breast cancer lack knowledge of their disease's characteristics, including tumor stage, grade, and receptor status (Cancer 2015 Jan 26 [Epub ahead of print]). Only 20% to 58% of 500 women surveyed reported the characteristics correctly.

  • The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) for the first time named its Advance of the Year: the transformation of treatment for adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The Advance of the Year was part of its Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO's Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer (see www.cancerprogress.net/cca).

  • Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) announced a multiyear agreement with Genentech to conduct whole-genome sequencing on tens of thousands of deidentified tissue samples. Based in La Jolla, CA, HLI aims to build the world's most comprehensive, integrated human genotype and phenotype database.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.

©2015 American Association for Cancer Research.
2015