“Advances in understanding the human genome are having a dramatic impact on almost every area of medicine. Foundation Medicine’s approach in harnessing the power of genomic data to improve care for cancer patients could represent an extremely important step forward in improving routine cancer care. I’m happy to be supporting this quite promising approach.”
With those words in a press release this morning, Bill Gates, the world’s second-richest man, announced that he was investing in Foundation Medicine, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that sells a $5,800 diagnostic test that uses DNA sequencing to help doctors guess which cancer drugs would be helpful in fighting a particular patient’s tumor.