Industry News: Roche Buys Flatiron

The big headline out of the health care M&A world today is Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche’s $1.9 billion acquisition of Flatiron Health, the Alphabet-backed, cancer-focused digital health analytics upstart that’s attempting to use real world patient information and big data to spur better oncology R&D. Flatiron’s cancer-centric electronic health records platform is linked to some 250 community oncology practices; it has a partnership with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to improve clinical trials by gathering data at the point of care. What’s made the company appealing to venture capital outfits, the drug industry, and the government is that Flatiron doesn’t just suck in a bunch of numbers and spit them out—its datasets are curated in an effort to separate statistical noise from actionable information. That’s hard to pull off on a mass scale. - From Fortune.com Subscribe to us on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe_8N