Following is the transcript of the Foundation Medicine Inc.’s (NASDAQ:FMI) introduction of the New Interactive Cancer Explorer (ICE) physician portal made on Thursday, January 8, 2015, 10:00 AM ET. The ICE 2, among other updates, features Patient Match, which will enable physicians to connect with other physicians treating patients with similar tumor profiles.
Foundation Medicine, Inc. (NASDAQ:FMI) is a molecular information company. It offers tests that help oncologists choose treatments for their patient’s unique cancers by providing fully informative genomic profiles that can be matched with targeted therapies and clinical trials. The company’s molecular information platform is targeted towards improving day-to-day care for cancer patients as well as aims to advance molecular medicine in cancer diagnosis and treatments.
Company Representatives
Steven Kafka, Chief Operating Officer, Foundation Medicine, Inc.
Gaurav Singal, Director of Innovations, Foundation Medicine, Inc.
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Introducing Foundation Medicine’s New Interactive Cancer Explorer. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. (Operator Instruction). As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference,Foundation Medicine Incorporated. Please go ahead.
Steven Kafka, Chief Operating Officer, Foundation Medicine, Inc.
Good morning and thank you for joining us this morning for our webinar, Introducing the New Version of our Interactive Cancer Explorer, ICE 2. I’m Steve Kafka, Chief Operating Officer of Foundation Medicine. Joining me this morning is Dr. Gaurav Singal, Director of our Innovations unit, who together with the terrific team here at Foundation Medicine, has designed and built ICE 2. Gaurav is a physician and computer scientist who joined us from the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he completed his residency and also led the development of a physician-facing EMR application that uses natural language processing to automate chart review.
Today, we are excited to introduce you to ICE2,which was launched last month and is our next generation platform created to enable physicians to increase the efficiency of patient care and enhance the utility of our tests.
This new platform allows physicians in a HIPAA-complaint fashion to access results from our comprehensive genomic profiling tests to obtain information about potential treatment options and clinical trials and to connect with other physicians who have treated similar patients to share treatment and outcomes data. Among other updates, we were particularly excited about a key new feature of ICE2, PatientMatch. PatientMatch is a tool that leverages the now more than 27,000 patient cases in our knowledge base to enable physicians who are facing an increasingly complex cancer landscape to interact with one another regarding treatment options for patients with similar tumor and genomic profiles.
We believe the combination of these features is important in integrating ICE2 into the daily workflow of physicians. No other network connects physicians in this way. In many ways, we are building on what physicians do each and every day, namely, relying on their colleagues to discuss challenging treatment scenarios. But now, we have been enabled physicians to take this practice to scale. This ability to exchange information in real time and learn from one another must be an essential component of this transformation in cancer care, which is rapidly moving towards a precision-based approach.
Adaption of our comprehensive genomic profiling products within the clinical setting continues to grow, and the introduction of ICE 2 is an exciting step toward ultimately enabling more informed treatment options for patients.
I now turn things over to Gaurav to introduce you to the concept and key features of ICE 2, after which, we will open the lines up for your questions. Gaurav?
Gaurav Singal, Director of Innovations Unit, Foundation Medicine, Inc.
Thanks, Steve for the introduction, and it’s a real pleasure to be able to introduce you all to Foundation ICE 2 this morning. ICE 2 is the next major release of our interactive cancer explorer. In addition to doing all the things that ICE does today, ICE 2 includes several powerful new features designed to allow users to more efficiently manage their patient cases and make more informed treatment decisions enhancing the actionability of FoundationOne and FoundationOne Heme. ICE 2 is something we have been thinking about for quite a long time now. We have developed it over 18 months in consultation with many UI, UX,visual design groups and experts. With their help, we have interviewed a broad group of our users, oncologists, nurse practitioners, nurses, administration staff, anybody who interact with Foundation Medicine from ordering the test, receiving the results,or interacting online with our interactivecancer explorer.
We have worked with these users to understand their needs, their motivation and any barriers to not only using Foundation Medicine’s test and interface, but in the care of their patients holistically. With the input of these users and these design experts, we have designed and tested several rounds of wireframes, mockups, clickable prototypes, and each round going back to our users, testing our hypothesis, learning from their advice and revising them, not just strategically but based on interaction and visual elements. With the accumulated feedback, we have put together what is now our ICE 2 platform, which is designed to fit into the daily clinical workflow, not just to address their needs but to make sure that they can actually use this on a day-to-day basis.
In developing ICE 2, we thought about several different components. One, we wanted to modernize the interface and the technology. Second, learn to build features that improve the efficiency of interacting with Foundation Medicine and of managing their patients. Third and most importantly, we sought to increase the actionability of our results.
On the technology front, we redesigned the application with a very user standard design methodology which included our complete rebranding effort. The interface that we have built is built on a mobile ready platform to allow us to reach our users through whatever medium they require in whatever context. We have also rebuilt the technology stack front to back to set us up for innovation and new feature development over the coming months and years.
On the efficiency front, we built several important new features. We built an advanced search capabilities so users, whatever their positions, practice managers, researchers can now interact with their work list and with their patients, not just by searching by name or by diagnosis but by searching by gene and alteration.
We also built a sample tracking directly into ICE interfacing with our lab so the users can track not just reports that have been returned to them but also reports that are still in progress. We have built notifications platform that allowed users to receive notifications not just by email but also through ICE, to adapt to not just the notifications delivered today but notifications we will be delivering in the future.
Now, on the actionability front, arguably most importantly, we built an architecture for collection, storage of outcome, and also implemented this in the PatientMatch feature, which we will describe to you in more detail.
ICE 2 and outcomes is something that we have been thinking about for a long time. At core, we are trying to help the oncologist field the questions for the patients in front of them. How has similar patients been treated and how has the patients done?
We have longed recognized that ICE 2, as the point of interface between Foundation Medicine and our users on a technology front, maybe the perfect place to collect that outcomes information and learn how positions and users are using Foundation Medicine’s information to care for their patients. It is also potentially the perfect opportunity for us to share information with those users about how other patients have been treated and how they have done specifically regarding off-table targeted therapies to allow them to make the most informed clinical decisions.
With these two principles in mind, we have developed PatientMatch. This new feature that allows Foundation Medicine users to access these outcomes data. PatientMatch leverages Foundation Medicine’s genomic database of now more than 27, 000 genomic profile to identify other patients similar to theirs, based on not only tumor type but also specific genomic profiles and alterations. We allowed these physicians to request the experience of these other Foundation Medicine users with a simple, structured response format. We are able to then store these responses in an outcomes database we use not only in PatientMatch but in all of our molecular information effort.
To take a hypothetical scenario to walk through PatientMatch, let us imagine the case of Dr. Cole, an oncologist who has ordered Foundation Medicine’s Foundation One test for a patient of hers with breast cancer. Foundation Onereport comes back with a finding of an EGFR L858R alteration. An alteration she is unfamiliar within that tumor type. PatientMatch tells her that there are, in fact, several other patients who we have seen in our database with similar genomic profile. PatientMatch then reaches out to those physicians who care for those patients on Dr. Cole’s behalf, one of whom is Dr. Miller.
Dr. Miller receives Dr. Cole’s request in his own email box and agrees to help her. He clicks on that email which takes him directly into Foundation ICE, chose him his matching patient and asks him four simple questions about his experience treating his matching patient. Dr. Miller’s response is then stored in an outcomes database, to be sent not only to Dr. Cole but saved to other physicians who have similar inquiries in the future and saved for other molecular information efforts at Foundation Medicine.
At 72 hours, after responses have been collected, Dr. Cole receives an email from PatientMatch informing her that her responsesare ready. Then clicking to that email, she is taking the Foundation ICE to her patient’s report now with the PatientMatch report attached that includes all of the information about how other physicians treated similar patients. It is important here to note that this is a natural extension of all physicians already due today. Physicians already are used to contacting their colleagues in consultation for care of complex or difficult patients.
Here, we have extended that model to a technological era so physicians can contact other physicians through an interface like ICE 2. Moreover, we have extended this content into the molecular era, where it’s not sufficient to just contact a colleague or specialist in a particular domain, but to actually contact the specialist who has seen a patient with a similar genomic profile. Our interface, PatientMatch, allows the physician to do that no matter where that physician or patient is located.
I would like to spend the next few minutes and actually walk you through a demo of how all of these features work.
This is the landing page of the work list where a physician or another Foundation Medicine user, be it a nurse practitioner, a nurse, an administrator, or researcher can interact with their entire work list of patients.
For those of you who are familiar with Foundation ICEas it exists today, the overall interface here will be familiar but the look and feel has been completely revamped. In the standards here, you will see a table that contains all of the patients for which foundation testing has been ordered. For patients who have reports already resulted, you see their name in blue and that links directly to the patient’s report. The diagnosis for each of those patients is listed along with now all of the genomic findings pulled right up under this work list. This is a new feature of ICE 2 that allows users at a glance to see the genomic distribution and see how those genomic findings are distributed across subsets of their patients.
If a user is a super user, for example, office manager or a nurse, they can see multiple physicians, potentially of multiple facilities, all in one interface. The final column shows the report status for a report that has already been resulted, the dateof that report is listed. For a report that is still in progress, for a sample that is still being processing, those results are shown in their stage of processing for the user. For example, that is not yet received by the lab, it is listed as pending specimen and that is an opportunity for that physician potentially to reach out to their pathology lab and make sure that that sample has been sent. A sample has been received and is already processing, it is listed either at sequencing, orif it is done, sequencing is analyzing results. Again, to allow the physicians to be as informed as possible about where their sample is in the process.
We have also significantly enhanced our search capability. With this one search box, a user can search their entire work list by patient name if they’re looking for a particular patient or record number and now, by gene and diagnosis. A physician or a user or an administrator who wants to find, let us say, all of the patients who have been found to have ALK mutations, then simply type ALK into this box and in real time, their entire work was just filtered. This is the feature that we have heard that is extremely helpful for physicians who wants to identify it, say, in a patient before with a particular combination of diagnosis and genomic finding or perhaps for clinical research coordinator who wants to see if there is enough patients who match a particular genomic profile to recruit a clinical trials to their institution.
Next, I’ll show you a detailed view of a patient report. The patient report again has been visually revamped to optimize for the physician and the user’s interaction. All of the components of the report that users are familiar with are still present, the patient demographics, the genomic findings, the associated therapies and the clinical trials. We have now built the interface so the users can get an overview of all of these findings at once and dive in to the features and get more details as needed.
We have pulled out all the genomic findings upfront withan individual brick for each gene and alteration has been identified. We have also listed the number of therapies that are associated with that finding. By clicking on one of these bricks, the user is able to go in and see details about why that gene is associated in this tumor type and what the implications are.
Next, we have called out all of the therapies that a user may consider based on the genomic findings. We have broken this down by therapies that are FDA approved in this tumor type and FDA approved therapies in other tumor types. Each of those therapies can be expanded in place to show the target and rationale for including that therapy in this report. Any references that maybe applicable which the user can then click through directly to PubMed and any clinical trials that are associated with that that a user might want to enroll their patient in.
Next, I want to show you a PatientMatch and I will spend the next few slides really diving intoPatientMatch because it is, in many ways, the most complex, innovative, and powerful new features in ICE 2. In addition to all of the patient report information, there is a new section of the report to highlight PatientMatch. Here, PatientMatch is taking our hypothetical case of Dr. Cole and her patient with breast cancer and an EGFR mutation and processed our entire genomic database and identified that in our database, there are 22 other practitioners who have seen similar patients. It gives Dr. Cole the opportunity at a click to ask those other physicians of their experience treating those patients. Dr. Cole clicks on PatientMatch because she is interested in finding out more about this EGFR mutation and what it means for her patient with breast cancer.
If you click on this, the PatientMatch feature is loaded and offers her the opportunity to inquire about any of the genomic findings in that patient report. Dr. Cole clicks on EGFR and PatientMatch identifies all of the physicians who matched that profile. Those physicians are listed here, anonymized to protect their privacy. Then the email is generated automatically on Dr. Cole’s behalf, customized to her particular inquiry. We heard loud and clear from physicians that they are very excited about the possibility of inquiring about other experiences in this manner, but they acknowledge that their time is limited and they do not actually have time to crop this email. As a result, we have created this email that includes all of the pertinent information about their patient and all Dr. Cole has to do is click one button to send this request.
When she clicks and requests, PatientMatch then sends this email, on her behalf, to all of these physicians who matched. If we flip to Dr. Miller’s email box, he will receive this email directly in his day-to-day email browser. It says, “Dear Dennis, I have a patient with breast cancer who had an EGFRL858R alteration identified by Foundation One. I am considering targeting this alteration for the next step in treatment of my patient. Foundation Medicine has identified that you may have seen a similar patient in your practice. Would you take a moment to answer a few simple questions that will help me and other physicians learn from your experience?”
Dr. Miller says, “Yes, I will share my experience.” It is taken directly into Foundation ICE. His matching patient’s report is pulled up in a format that is very familiar to him. Above that patient report, [Emma Potter], his own patient with breast cancer in this EGFR mutation,he is asked four simple questions that allow him to quickly and efficiently share his patient experience.
Dr. Miller is first asked if he treated his patient, [Emma Potter], with a therapy targeting EGFR. He is then asked, “Which therapy targeting EGFR, [Emma Potter] received?” This search block is powered by a drug dictionary in the background that automatically completes as he types. He types an ERL and it completes to erlotinib. It then asks Dr. Miller if his patient is still taking erlotinib, how long this patient was on erlotinib. Finally, what the patient’s best response was in erlotinib.
That is the end of the survey. We kept it short, concise and effective. Again, in consultation with a lot of feedback that we see from physicians. They want to help their colleague. They know there’s another patient on the other side of this request but they also recognized that their time is limited. In making four quick inefficient questions, we have optimized for the responding physician while still delivering critical information for the user who will use that information to make their own treatment decision.
We also recognize, of course, that there’s often other contexts that is required for a clinical case and we therefore give Dr. Miller the opportunity to provide either content information or additional comments or both, but neither is required if Dr. Miller does not have time.
After 82 hours, Dr. Cole receives an email informing her that her responses are now available. With a click, she is taken in to PatientMatch. Now, a report attached to the Foundation Ice report, and she sees row by row each of the responses from of all of the physicians that responded to her. It is important to note that she is also able to see all the responses in our database that it builds up overtime as physicians have answered his inquiry. And she gets the benefit not only of the physicians who were directly responding to her but of all the physicians who responded previously to similar requests. For each the responses, she sees demographic information about the matched patient, their tumor type and genomic profile, the drug they were treated with, how long they were treated with that drug, the response to that drug and any contact information that the physician may have provided or any comments.
ICE 2, in many ways, is a complete redesign of our interactive cancer explorer, everything from the visuals, the technology to the features stack, all designed to optimize the physician workflow. PatientMatch specifically is a critical new feature which allows users not only to manage their patient and use Foundation Medicine’s report but to understand how other genomically matched patients were treated and how they did clinically. It is an extension of the way that they have practiced for years, translated into the technology and molecular information era of present.
ICE 2 has already been launched to select users and over the course of the next six months, will be rolled out to all of our users and we anticipate a complete upgrade from ICE to ICE 2 by the end of the second quarter of this year. With that, I will turn it over to Steve and the rest of my colleagues to field any questions. Thanks.
Steven Kafka, Chief Operating Officer, Foundation Medicine, Inc.
Operator,we would like to open the line for questions.
Question and Answer Session:
Operator
(Operator Instructions) I am not showing any questions from the phone lines at this time.
Steven Kafka, Chief Operating Officer, Foundation Medicine, Inc.
Great. Well, this is Steve speaking again. I just want to say thank you again for taking the time this morning to join us. We are very excited to have introduced you to ICE 2. As the adoption of our comprehensive genomic profiling products really continues to grow, we believe that the introduction of this new version of ICE is an exciting step towards ultimately enabling more informed treatment options for patients and we look forward to sharing the experience with this new product over the coming weeks and months. Thanks again for your time this morning.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you participating in today’s conference. This does conclude the program and you may all disconnect. Everyone have a good day.
