I joined the Data Team at Foundation Medicine back in 2019 to help build our real-world data products. Cancer has touched all our lives in some fashion. That drives me to prioritize contributing to companies that focus on two things: one, addressing clinical unmet need at the intersection of patients, clinicians, and technology; and two, a patient-focused mission. While almost all companies in the healthcare industry work to positively impact patients’ lives, we here at Foundation Medicine truly live it. I’ve been delighted to find that not only are we helping patients every day with comprehensive genomic profiling and insights, but that the people here have a true passion for our mission: Transforming Cancer Care.

When I joined Foundation Medicine, my initial focus was on how we can impact biopharma drug development using the Flatiron Health – Foundation Medicine Clinico-Genomic Database (CGDB). This regularly-updated, deidentified dataset includes patient outcomes data from Flatiron’s network of oncology clinics linked with comprehensive genomic profiling results from Foundation Medicine’s FoundationCore(TM) data platform. We feel that if we can help identify new therapeutic targets, support the development of new cancer drugs, and be part of ensuring that the evidence for those drugs gets in the right hands (i.e., clinicians, payers, regulators), we can help create new and better options for the patients that we are testing every day.

Over time, as data was proven to be an increasingly critical part of all our activities at Foundation Medicine, we made the important decision to ‘infuse’ our data teams throughout the organization. As part of that, I had the privilege of joining the Foundation Medicine Global Portfolio Strategy team, and help create a new team called the Data and Insights Delivery Team, or DataID, which is focused on what we can do with our data.

The DataID team has a global scope focused on how our data – and the insights that we can generate from it – impacts the entire precision medicine ecosystem. At Foundation Medicine, one of our primary services is to provide the highest quality comprehensive genomic profiling to as many patients as possible every day. In DataID, we build upon the service in two distinct but related ways. First, we focus on ways to better enable clinicians to make the best decisions in the most effective way possible across our efforts in Data Sharing and Integrations. We work to be part of clinical workflows via electronic medical record (EMR) integrations, help ensure the next frontier of clinical care by providing data back to cutting-edge researchers, and enable tools and services built on our data. Second, we bring together the data from many patients to make population-level real world data impact with our Real World Data Solutions. We create and provide these solutions in the form of products and services that leverage our unique ability to conduct data management, aggregation, and harmonization from the source, all in order to generate insights that can impact clinical, biopharma, and even Foundation Medicine research and development stakeholders.

As part of DataID, I am privileged to work with a great team that passionately lives our mission and all of our shared values. We recognize the importance of what we can accomplish together in order to impact people facing cancer in the future. A big part of our roles, typically, is that we get to work very cross-functionally with a lot of the other parts of the organization to develop and deliver our solutions. It is great to be connected in a way that allows us to chart the course and guide the journey for data at Foundation Medicine. And we try to have fun doing it!

To view open roles on our GPS team, click here.

Here from Naima, Director of Data Strategy Marketing on the Data Insights and Delivery team about how she develops our commercialization strategy for our data products that are derived from the outputs of our diagnostic tests.