While still in their 20s, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg built a $2 billion company to pursue an impossible dream—to conquer the Big C. They've not only made fast progress—they've also gotten rich trying
Zach Weinberg (left) and Nat Turner on the roof of their new offices on Spring Street in Manhattan. Flatiron Health is the third company they’ve started together
Image: Matt Furman for Forbes
In 2008, when he was 23, Nat Turner was on a hike in North Carolina with his six-year-old cousin, Brennan Simkins. Brennan’s legs got weak, and the weakness kept getting worse. He turned out to have a rare and deadly paediatric leukemia that kept coming back after treatment. When Brennan needed a second bone marrow transplant, several hospitals refused to do it and his family was losing hope—until they found a specialist who would help. Exasperated, Brennan’s father asked Turner: Why doesn’t one hospital know what others will do? Is there anyone collecting statistics?
“All right,” Turner remembers thinking, “there’s a lot of value for patients locked in the clinical data. We should be the ones who unlock it.”
For another recent college graduate, that might have been merely a fleeting “deep thought”. But Turner, along with his college friend and business partner, Zach Weinberg, was looking to start a third company. His first, an online food delivery business Weinberg and he started their freshman year at Wharton, had failed, but a second one, an online advertising business called Invite Media, sold to Google for $81 million in 2010, when they were 24.
Free from financial concerns and still working at Google, they were filling their office whiteboard with ideas about what to do next. They were fascinated by health care. “We were very titillated by it because it’s so complicated and neither one of us knew anything about it,” Turner says. Brennan’s experience became a beacon guiding them on a new effort.
Turner and Weinberg’s new company, Flatiron Health, was founded in 2012 with the goal of pooling patient data from electronic health records in a way that could answer scientific questions and improve medicine. It raised $328 million, and as a result Turner (the CEO) and Weinberg (the COO) headlined the 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list. Forbes estimates Flatiron’s annual revenue approaches $200 million. In April, Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, bought Flatiron for $1.9 billion, not including the $200 million stake it already owned in the data science company. The deal made Turner and Weinberg $250 million each, Forbes estimates.
Flatiron aims to overcome one of the biggest limitations on medical research. If researchers want to know whether a new medicine is effective, there is really only one option: Recruit patients to volunteer for a clinical trial and randomly assign them to receive either the new medicine or a placebo. But this approach has shortcomings. Sometimes it’s not ethical to make patients take a placebo. And clinical trials involve carefully selected patients. There is always the worry that results will be different in the real world.
But getting data from the real world is extremely difficult. At many cancer hospitals, administrators may not even know basics like how many patients have breast or pancreatic cancer. Flatiron’s solution is to own the right to use data from an electronic medical record used by nearly 280 medical practices for 2 million patients. It pays 1,000 contractors to read the text notes doctors write about their patients and turn the notes into data on what medicines patients take, how well they work, and what happens next. This can be turned into a larger data set that measures how well medicines are actually working, a potential that has Flatiron collaborating with all the largest makers of cancer drugs.
“ It’s stunning how far behind banking and manufacturing medicine is.”
(This story appears in the 15 February, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)