Pharmaceutical giant Roche bought health tech startup Flatiron Health for $1.9 billion in 2018 to expand its reach into real-world evidence and accelerate its development of cancer medicines.
Flatiron, once backed by Alphabet, built its business around oncology-focused electronic health record software and a repository of real-world cancer data. The company says it partners with hundreds of cancer centers and community oncology practices and more than 20 global developers of oncology therapeutics.
Flatiron, founded in 2012, set itself apart by pulling data out of hard-to-access sources and using them to build high-quality curated repositories.
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“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,” Daniel O’Day, CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals, said in a statement when the deal was announced in 2018, as Fierce Biotech reported.
However, the Swiss pharma company is considering divesting Flatiron Health, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Roche is now working with Citigroup to assess options for Flatiron, including divesting the business or selling part of the company to a partner that could help run the business, the FT report said.
A Roche spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumors, as a matter of policy.
Roche has kept Flatiron as a separate business entity, but its ownership has deterred other drugmakers from doing business with the company, which has hurt sales, FT reported, citing the sources familiar with the matter.
The pharma company has seen major leadership changes in the past six years since Flatiron was acquired.
Last year, Flatiron renewed its partnership with the Food and Drug Administration to jointly develop and implement specific research projects to advance the use of real-world data.
Flatiron currently has operations in Japan, Germany and the U.K. that partner with hospitals and health networks in real-world data collaborations.
The company has continued to forge partnerships, but many of the publicly disclosed collaborations have been with healthcare and academic organizations rather than pharma companies. Earlier this year, the Association of Cancer Care Centers announced it was working with Flatiron to integrate its technology connecting electronic health records and electronic data captures in clinical trials into its network of community cancer centers.
Last year, Flatiron inked a collaboration with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the largest acute hospital trusts in Europe. In May 2023, it signed a deal with Sanofi to redesign oncology trials, and, last June, the company partnered with AI-focused Lifebit to advance research and development of treatments targeting cancer.
In January, at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Caris Life Sciences unveiled a collaboration to combine its database with Flatiron’s own AI-powered platform of real-world oncology data—with an aim of giving cancer researchers a more robust resource to help them develop new precision therapeutics, Fierce Medtech reported.