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. “

The top career staff at the FDA has vowed not to let politics overrule 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 the FDA and other health agencies under his purview of their rule making 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.

President Donald Trump, who seems intent on announcing a COVID-19 vaccine before Election Day, could legally authorize a vaccine over the objections of experts, officials at the FDA and even vaccine manufacturers, who have pledged not to release any vaccine unless it’s proved safe and effective.

In podcasts, public forums, social media and medical journals, a growing number of prominent health leaders say they fear that Trump — who has repeatedly signaled his desire for the swift approval of a vaccine and his displeasure with perceived delays at the FDA — will take matters into his own hands, running roughshod over the usual regulatory process.

Having worked in parallel for years to move their respective PD-1 inhibitors up to the first-line treatment of gastrointestinal cancers, Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb finally have the data at ESMO for a showdown.

Comparing KEYNOTE-590 and CheckMate-649, of course, comes with the usual caveats. But a side-by-side look at the overall survival numbers also offer some perspective on a new frontier for the reigning checkpoint rivals, both of whom are claiming to have achieved a first.

Roche is gambling on a new way of discovering drug targets and, ultimately, promising to infuse more than $375 million into a small biotech if all goes well.

A spinout of the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Oxford University, Scenic Biotech set out to pioneer a field that’s gaining some traction among top VCs in the US: to harness the natural protecting powers of genetic modifiers — specific genes that suppress a disease phenotype.

William B Crews had been a public affairs specialist at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

That ended today when he informed the agency of his decision to retire, after he was identified as the managing editor at RedState, a prominent Trump loyalist website.

Crews’ RedState duties are performed under the alias streiff. While enjoying the benefits of pseudonymity, he disparaged and worked against NIAID with an incendiary level of rhetoric in the midst of a pandemic.