Biogen Exec Talks Google's Verily Partnership & Google’s Ultimate Game Plan
February 1, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
At a recent Harvard Business School Healthcare Conference, Cambridge, Mass.-based Biogen ’s Adam Koppel, vice president of corporate development, had some insight on what Google’s ultimate strategy might be.
It’s hardly an idle question. There are times when Google’s ultimate goal, one they’re not all that shy about discussing, is to control all the data on the planet. Last year Google created an umbrella company, Alphabet, and started spinning off its various divisions to stand alone under Alphabet. The first to go was Google’s Life Sciences, which was renamed Verily.
Verily, in a broad sense, plans to bring together hardware, software, clinical data and science research to learn more about how the human body works and to “transform the prevention, detection, and management of disease.”
That seems rather lofty and might give a 20,000-feet view of the company’s plans, but Koppel gave some insight into at least a few of the nuts and bolts. “We asked them the question: What is it they are really trying to do?” Koppel said at the conference. “They want to become the payer.”
Verily has a new deal with Biogen. The focus will be to use Verily’s access to healthcare metrics to study the environmental and biological factors related to the progression of multiple sclerosis, which is one of Biogen’s key markets.
“Our central thesis is to change health care from being reactive to proactive,” Verily’s chief executive officer, Andy Conrad, told BloombergBusiness. “We’re trying to understand disease at its onset and see if we can intervene early.”
Biogen’s vice president of development sciences, Rick Rudick, told BloombergBusiness, “We used to see patients at the beginning stages of MS—two women would come in with optic neuritis, they couldn’t see out of one eye, they’d have some spots on the MRI scan, and they looked very similar. But as we followed them along, 10 years later, one would be a championship tennis player and one would be in a nursing home. I never understood that.”
Which circles back to Koppel’s take on Google and Verily. “They want to take over CMS,” he said at Harvard. “And they will say that to you.”
Why exactly Google would want to take on the myriad roles of the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) may be related to wanting access to the health care data of nearly everyone in the U.S.
Despite Google’s failed attempt with Google Health to redefine patient health records, it also was part of a PricewaterhouseCoopers-led group trying to win a Department of Defense electronic health record contract worth $11 billion. That bid, however, went to Cerner, Leidos and Accenture. In fact, Google didn’t make the final three, which was Epic Systems and IBM ; Cerner, Leidos and Accenture; and Allscripts, Computer Sciences Corp. and Hewlett-Packard.
“Market share was not a consideration,” said Frank Kendall, DoD Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics to Healthcare IT News. ”We wanted minimum modifications.”
Google, and in the context of health care, Verily, recognizes that medicine and payers are basically IT companies. As MedCityNews writes, “Real-world outcomes data is critical these days, in terms of designing treatment plans, configuring reimbursement strategies, and even in developing new therapies. The only real way to make sense of a sea of outcomes data is through big data analytics.”
Which is something that Google does very well. However, it’s not clear whether companies really want to turn over all their data to Google. But Biogen can certainly benefit from a larger reservoir of patient data and big data analytics, especially now that it’s made a pivot from MS toward Alzheimer’s disease.
“We’re actually looking to build a consortium with them to pool this data, to understand the biomarkers and safety markers,” Koppell said at Harvard. “What Google can do that a biopharmaceutical company can’t is pool all this data—and they have the queries and search tools to create signals from noise in a way I don’t think any of us can do on our own.”