Dutch an­a­lyt­ics and re­search ser­vices gi­ant Qi­a­gen has bought the foren­sic ge­net­ics com­pa­ny Vero­gen for $150 mil­lion, the com­pa­nies an­nounced Mon­day.

Vero­gen per­forms DNA test­ing on sam­ples from crime scenes, war zones, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters and oth­er non-clin­i­cal or re­search set­tings. In re­cent years, crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tors and am­a­teur sleuths have used ge­net­ic test­ing to solve cold cas­es that have re­mained dor­mant for years, of­ten us­ing ge­net­ic tests com­bined with large DNA data­bas­es to track down sus­pects.

In one high-pro­file case, in­ves­ti­ga­tors used DNA, com­bined with com­mer­cial­ly avail­able fam­i­ly ge­net­ic data­bas­es, to catch the “Gold­en State Killer,” an ex-po­lice of­fi­cer who even­tu­al­ly pled guilty to 13 mur­ders that were com­mit­ted in Cal­i­for­nia in the 1970s and 1980s.

Qi­a­gen will buy the close­ly-held com­pa­ny with cash, and ex­pects sales from the unit of about $20 mil­lion this year, the com­pa­nies said in a press re­lease. The com­pa­nies have had a dis­tri­b­u­tion part­ner­ship since 2021.

Qi­a­gen’s chem­istry and test­ing kits are al­ready wide­ly used in foren­sic analy­sis, the com­pa­ny said. But the deal with give Qi­a­gen ac­cess to an Il­lu­mi­na ma­chine that Vero­gen us­es specif­i­cal­ly con­fig­ured for foren­sics work, es­pe­cial­ly hard­er-to-process sam­ples. It will al­so gain a data­base in­ter­face, GED­Match, that al­lows the com­pa­ny and law en­force­ment to match sam­ples across com­mer­cial­ly avail­able DNA banks, in­clud­ing ge­neal­o­gy sites that con­tain mil­lions of pro­files up­loaded by mem­bers of the pub­lic in­ter­est­ed in their fam­i­ly his­to­ries.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”