Phar­ma gi­ant Roche is step­ping a foot firm­ly in the tech world, putting down $1.9 bil­lion to buy a soft­ware com­pa­ny found­ed by two ex-Googlers.

Nat Turn­er

The com­pa­ny, called Flat­iron Health, is de­vel­op­ing tech for life sci­ence, aca­d­e­mics, and hos­pi­tals. Roche was al­ready a fi­nan­cial backer for the New York City-based com­pa­ny, pre­vi­ous­ly own­ing 12% of Flat­iron be­fore the buy­out. Adding up its ex­ist­ing stake, Roche is pay­ing more like $2.1 bil­lion to get its hands on the com­pa­ny.

Be­sides Roche, Flat­iron’s biggest in­vestors in­clude Al­pha­bet’s GV (for­mer­ly Google Ven­tures). The com­pa­ny was found­ed by ex-Google em­ploy­ees Nat Turn­er and Zach Wein­berg.

Flat­iron has an elec­tron­ic health record sys­tem used by on­col­o­gists that col­lects da­ta, which lat­er be­comes use­ful to drug­mak­ers.

Zach Wein­berg

This lat­est deal high­light’s Roche’s in­creas­ing in­ter­est in tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. It’s pre­vi­ous­ly part­nered with 23andMe and Foun­da­tion Med­i­cine.

“This is an im­por­tant step in our per­son­al­ized health­care strat­e­gy for Roche, as we be­lieve that reg­u­la­to­ry-grade re­al-world ev­i­dence is a key in­gre­di­ent to ac­cel­er­ate the de­vel­op­ment of, and ac­cess to, new can­cer treat­ments,” said Roche CEO Daniel O’Day in a state­ment. “As a lead­ing tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny in on­col­o­gy, Flat­iron Health is best po­si­tioned to pro­vide the tech­nol­o­gy and da­ta an­a­lyt­ics in­fra­struc­ture need­ed not on­ly for Roche, but for on­col­o­gy re­search and de­vel­op­ment ef­forts across the en­tire in­dus­try. “

Another big drug approval came through on Friday afternoon as the FDA OK’d AbbVie’s upadacitinib — an oral JAK1 inhibitor that is hitting the rheumatoid arthritis market with a black box warning of serious malignancies, infections and thrombosis reflecting fears associated with the class.

It will be sold as Rinvoq — at a wholesale price of $59,000 a year — and will likely soon face competition from a drug that AbbVie once controlled, and spurned. Reuters reports that a 4-week supply of Humira, by comparison, is $5,174, adding up to about $67,000 a year.

ICER has some strong words for PTC, Sarepta and the FDA as the US drug price watchdog concludes that as currently priced, their respective new treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy are decidedly not cost-effective.

The final report — which cements the conclusions of a draft issued in May — incorporates the opinion of a panel of 17 experts ICER convened in a public meeting last month. It also based its analysis of Emflaza (deflazacort) and Exondys 51 (eteplirsen) on updated annual costs of $81,400 and over $1 million, respectively, after citing “incorrect” lower numbers in the initial calculations.

There’s nothing quite like a big patent win when it comes to burnishing your prospects in the pipeline. And for Amgen, which seems to have rescued Enbrel for a run to 2029, the cheering section on Wall Street is now fixed on AMG 510 and a key rival.

And it didn’t take much data to do it. 

There was the first snapshot of a handful of patients, with a 50% response rate. Then came word that Amgen researchers are also tracking responses in different cancers, at least one in colorectal cancer and appendiceal too. 

→ Bain Capital is deploying one of its top investors to Cerevel Therapeutics, steering a $350 million-plus neuro play carved out of Pfizer. Orly Mishan — a co-founder and principal of Bain’s life sciences unit — was involved in the partnership that birthed the biotech spinout in the first place. As Cerevel’s first chief business officer, she is tasked with corporate development, program management as well as technical operations. 

After a “hot” period of rapid growth between 2009 and 2012, and a relatively “cooler” period of slower growth from 2013 to 2015, China has once again become a top-of-mind priority for the CEOs of most large, multinational pharmaceutical companies.

At the International Pharma Forum, hosted in March in Beijing by the R&D Based Pharmaceutical Association Committee (RDPAC) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), no fewer than seven CEOs of major multinational pharmaceutical firms participated, including GSK, Eli Lilly, LEO Pharma, Merck KGaA, Pfizer, Sanofi and UCB. A few days earlier, the CEOs of several other large multinationals attended the China Development Forum, an annual business forum hosted by the research arm of China’s State Council. It’s hard to imagine any other country, except the US, having such drawing power at CEO level.