When Chi­na’s biggest search en­gine builder for­ays in­to biotech, ex­pect it to move in large strides.

Baidu is re­port­ed­ly scout­ing around for in­vestors to col­lec­tive­ly put $2 bil­lion be­hind a biotech start­up that would lever­age its ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence tech­nolo­gies in dis­ease di­ag­no­sis and drug dis­cov­ery — fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Amer­i­can tech gi­ants while join­ing its Chi­nese coun­ter­parts in mak­ing health­care in­vest­ments.

The goal is not to be a con­trol­ling share­hold­er, ac­cord­ing to in­sid­ers who told Reuters about the plan. CN­BC lat­er con­firmed the dis­cus­sions, re­port­ing that the start­up will like­ly be a stand­alone com­pa­ny rather than a sub­sidiary.

CEO Robin Li is per­son­al­ly in­volved in the project, sources said, the idea for which first came about six months ago.

Baidu isn’t com­ing in en­tire­ly un­in­formed. Through its ven­ture arm, it has in­vest­ed in AI star­tups such as Atom­wise and In­sil­i­co, as well as di­ag­nos­tic play­er Po­laris Bi­ol­o­gy and T cell ther­a­py de­vel­op­er Root­Path.

At the peak of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic in Chi­na back in Feb­ru­ary, Baidu al­so open-sourced its RNA pre­dic­tion al­go­rithm Lin­ear­Fold in hopes of help­ing front­line re­searchers bet­ter un­der­stand how SARS-CoV-2 is spread­ing. It promised to re­duce over­all analy­sis time from 55 min­utes to 27 sec­onds, or 120 times faster.

Al­though Al­iba­ba and Ten­cent have backed health­care ven­tures, they have his­tor­i­cal­ly fo­cused on telemed­i­cine, med­ical im­age analy­sis, drug dis­tri­b­u­tion and even in­sur­ance, aid­ing R&D on­ly in­di­rect­ly through their tools.

In con­trast, Google par­ent Al­pha­bet has launched a whole sub­sidiary — Ver­i­ly — ded­i­cat­ed to life sci­ence re­search. Google it­self has al­lied with Sanofi in a pact sim­i­lar to what Mi­crosoft inked with No­var­tis, where the tech ti­tans lend their com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­ers to solve the phar­ma gi­ants’ most press­ing chal­lenges.

But the pan­dem­ic has ev­i­dent­ly pushed bio­phar­ma to the top of Chi­nese tech ex­ec­u­tives’ agen­das. Ten­cent launched its own AI drug dis­cov­ery plat­form in Ju­ly called iDrug, and Baidu an­nounced one month lat­er that it will be open­ing up two new labs fo­cused on bio­sta­tis­tics and biosafe­ty.

The yet-to-be-named new start­up is ex­pect­ed to ma­te­ri­al­ize with­in the next three years.

The top career staff at the FDA have vowed not to let politics get in the way of science when looking at vaccine data this fall. But Alex Azar, who happens to be their boss’s boss, apparently won’t even give them a chance to stand in the way.

In a new memorandum issued Tuesday last week, the HHS chief stripped health agencies under his purview — including the FDA — of their rulemaking ability, asserting all such power “is reserved to the Secretary.” Sheila Kaplan of the New York Times first obtained and reported the details of the September 15 bulletin.

J&J’s one-two punch on EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer has turned up some promising — although decidedly early — results, fueling the idea that there’s yet room to one up on third-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Twenty out of 20 advanced NSCLC patients had a response after taking a combination of an in-house TKI dubbed lazertinib and amivantamab, a bispecific antibody targeting both EGFR and cMET engineered on partner Genmab’s platform, J&J reported at ESMO. All were treatment-naïve, and none has seen their cancer progress at a median follow-up of seven months.

AstraZeneca has unveiled the final, mature overall survival data that cemented Lynparza’s first approval in prostate cancer approval — touting its lead against rivals with the only PARP inhibitor to have demonstrated such benefit.

But getting the Merck-partnered drug to the right patients remains a challenge, something the companies are hoping to change with the new data cut.

The OS numbers on the subgroup with BRCA1/2 or ATM-mutated metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer are similar to the first look on offer when the FDA expanded the label in May: Lynparza reduced the risk of death by 31% versus Xtandi and Zytiga. Patients on Lynparza lived a median of 19.1 months, compared to 14.7 months for the anti-androgen therapies (p = 0.0175).

Late in August, as negotiations on a pricing deal with President Trump reached a boiling point, PhRMA president Stephen Ubl sent an email update to the 34 biopharma chiefs that sit on his board. He wrote that if the industry did not agree to pay for a $100 “cash card” sent to seniors before November, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was going to tell the news media Big Pharma was refusing to “share the savings” with the elderly — and that all of the blame for failed drug pricing negotiations would lie squarely on the industry.