Happy Endings: Guardant & Foundation Make Sweet Lemonade Out of False Advertising Lemons

In June 2017, Guardant Health sued Foundation Medicine for making false statements about the Guardant360 test in its advertisements for the FoundationACT liquid biopsy genomic profiling test. Foundation denied the allegations and countersued, claiming that Guardant was the one making false statements about the tests in its advertising materials. But now cooler heads have prevailed with news that the sides have settled the case by asking that both claims be dismissed.

But what makes the settlement worthy of inclusion in this column are the proactive measures the sides agreed to take to turn an ugly situation into a positive, including the creation of:

• A process to quickly resolve any future advertising-related disputes between the companies; and
• A working group to study development of standard definitions and formulas validating genomic profiling assays.