Foresight Diagnostics Establishes Scientific Advisory Board with Appointment of Sandra Horning, M.D.

Accomplished academic and industry veteran with a successful record developing treatments for B cell lymphoma

AURORA, Colo., Jan. 19, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Foresight Diagnostics today announced the appointment of Sandra Horning, M.D., FACP, FASCO, to its newly established Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Dr. Horning is an expert in the field of lymphoma therapy and is an accomplished Stanford University professor and biopharmaceutical industry executive. Dr. Horning has a keen interest in advancing minimal residual disease (MRD) adoption to accelerate the development of new drugs and clinical practice for the treatment and cure of cancers.

“Sandra has been at the forefront of biopharmaceutical innovation for many years, and brings significant experience and insight to our team,” said Jake Chabon, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Foresight Diagnostics. “We share a vision of improving cancer patient management by employing better diagnostic tools, as well as a shared belief that more sensitive MRD assays can improve clinical decision making. Additionally, Sandra’s first-hand experience in developing treatments for B cell lymphoma gives her a unique perspective that will inform development of our CLIA-validated B-cell lymphoma MRD platform. We look forward to Sandra’s contributions to Foresight as we realize our vision for improved patient care.”

Dr. Horning is a co-founder and board member of EQRx and currently serves on the Boards of Directors at Gilead Sciences, Moderna and Olema Oncology. Previously, she served at Genentech/Roche as Chief Medical Officer and Head of Global Product Development from 2014 to 2019, where she oversaw the approval of 15 new medicines for multiple disease areas, including B-cell lymphomas. Prior to joining Genentech/Roche, Dr. Horning was a Professor of Medicine, Oncology and Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation at Stanford University for more than 20 years, where she remains a Professor Emerita. At Stanford she specialized in the treatment of lymphomas, authoring more than 150 studies and participating in over 50 clinical trials, including multiple studies involving MRD.

Dr. Horning has received numerous awards and recognitions including the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association 2020 Woman of the Year, 2017 Duane Roth Memorial Award, 2014 Fierce Biotech Top Women in Biotech Award and 2010 Top Women in Bay Area Business Award. She was President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology from 2005-2006. She has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, Clinical Lymphoma, Leukemia & Lymphoma, the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Medicine and has authored more than 300 publications. Dr. Horning received her M.D. from University of Iowa School of Medicine and completed her post-graduate fellowship in Oncology and Cancer Biology at Stanford University. 

“My career, both in academia and industry, has always been focused on improving patient care and outcomes,” said Dr. Horning. “Foresight’s PhasED-Seq platform has demonstrated significantly improved sensitivity for identifying minimal residual disease in B-cell lymphoma patients during and after treatment, and I look forward to working with the Foresight team to establish PhasED-Seq as the best-in-class MRD assay both for new therapeutic development and routine clinical practice”.

About Foresight Diagnostics
Foresight Diagnostics is a privately held cancer diagnostics company and CLIA-registered laboratory. The company has developed a novel liquid biopsy testing platform for the measurement of minimal residual disease (MRD) that is significantly more sensitive (with a detection limit below 0.0001%, or one part-per-million) than existing tests. The improved sensitivity of the Foresight lymphoma MRD assay can provide actionable information to physicians and biopharmaceutical companies to enable more personalized treatment approaches for patients with B-cell malignancies. Foresight is developing an MRD assay for other tumor types based on the same technology. For more information, please visit foresight-dx.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About PhasED-Seq
The Foresight MRD platform is based on the Phased variant Enrichment and Detection by Sequencing (PhasED-Seq) technology. PhasED-Seq lowers the error profile of mutation detection in sequencing data by requiring the concordant detection of two separate non-reference events in an individual DNA molecule. By detecting more than one mutation, PhasED-Seq can more accurately distinguish tumor-derived cell free DNA (i.e., ctDNA) from healthy cell free DNA – enabling detection of ctDNA at levels below one part-per-million (<0.0001%). PhasED-Seq has been extensively validated in hundreds of patients with B-cell lymphomas. 

Contact Foresight
Name: Mukul Agarwal
Phone: 720-443-3658
Email: press@foresight-dx.com