December 22, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
BETHESDA, Md. – Precision For Medicine, a specialty services company that helps life sciences companies develop and market new medicines, received $75 million in funding from TPG Capital LP.
Ethan Leder, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors for Precision for Medicine, said the new funding will enable the company to better serve its client partners in a more demanding market.
“The life sciences market is experiencing unprecedented change and growth spurred by the innovations of precision medicine. At the same time, our clients’ innovations have to be rationalized in a market facing limited resources and demanding proof of value. We feel fortunate to be working with a team who understands our vision and has the resources and capabilities to support our growth,” Leder said in a statement.
Launched in 2012, Precision for Medicine was formed to provide services and infrastructure to support life sciences companies as they develop new products in the age of precision medicine. Precision medicine is “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person,” according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the leading proponents of the precision medicine movement.
Precision medicine is an initiative that has strong support in the White House. Earlier this year, the administration of President Barack Obama announced a national biomedical initiative that includes collecting genetic data on one million U.S. citizens to foment the development of better treatment and medications to combat cancers and other serious illnesses. Dubbed the Precision Medicine Initiative, the White House plan would allow scientists to collect medical information from volunteers to study their genetics, environmental information and microbial information to learn how to individualize medical care. The White House said personalized care will, according to officials, allow physicians to choose the right medication to target a genetic defect causing an illness, such as cystic fibrosis. Current cancer genome research, such as that conducted by The Cancer Genome Atlas, has provided greater understanding of the molecular changes that occur in many cancers.
On its website, Precision for Medicine touted the notion of precision medicine. “The era of one-size-fits-all medicine is giving way to treatment based on personal information that provides real evidence of whether a specific product is likely to work for a particular patient. These data may range from genetic information derived from a blood test to clinical trials leveraging novel patient stratification techniques or even consumer behavior distilled from novel big data methods,” the company said.
TPG’s investment in Precision for Medicine is not the company’s first venture into the health sciences world. In 2007, TPG Capital acquired Axcan Pharma Inc. for $1.3 billion. In 2012, TPG acquired Par Specialty Pharmaceuticals, formerly Strativa Pharmaceuticals, stock and barrel by TPG Capital for $1.9 billion. TPG has $70.2 billion of capital under management in total, Reuters reported.
In 2014, Precision for Medicine launched Precision for Value and Precision Advisors to “deliver strategic support, development, and communication of product value for clients in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries.”
