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 firehose of biopharma news is gushing these days.

That’s why broader and deeper is the theme for 2021 at Endpoints. You can expect new coverage outside our core R&D focus, with deeper reporting in some key areas. When John Carroll and I launched Endpoints nearly five years ago, we were wading in waist-high waters. Now we’re a team of 25 full-time staffers (and growing) with plans to cover the flood of biopharma news, Endpoints-style.

It’s time for a new FDA commissioner to come on board, a rite of passage for Joe Biden’s administration that should help seal the new president’s rep on seeking out the experts to lead the government over the next 4 years.

As of now, the competition for the top job appears to have narrowed down to 2 people: The longtime CDER chief Janet Woodcock and Joshua Sharfstein, the former principal deputy at the FDA under Peggy Hamburg. Both were appointed by Barack Obama.

GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta isn’t alone in the small circle of approved lupus nephritis drugs anymore.

Little Aurinia Pharmaceuticals has gotten the green light from the FDA to start marketing its first and only program, voclosporin, under the brand name Lupkynis — something CEO Peter Greenleaf says it’s been ready to do since December.

Regulators went right down to the wire on the decision, keeping the company and the entire salesforce it’s already assembled on its toes.

GlaxoSmithKline’s HIV unit ViiV was dealt a stinging loss back in late 2019 when the FDA slammed the brakes on its application for a once-monthly injection based on manufacturing issues. Now, with that roadblock in the rearview, ViiV has finally made good on its promise to change the HIV game.

The FDA on Thursday approved ViiV’s Cabenuva (cabotegravir and rilpivirine) as a long acting, once-monthly therapy for HIV-positive adults who are virologically suppressed and on a stable antiviral regimen.