Palantir to set up a joint venture called Syntropy with German lab supplies company Merck KGaA to offer cancer data analytics tools to research centers
Reuters : Tweets: @dangillmor and @evgenymorozov Tweets: Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Data-mongering Palantir is a supremely creepy company, and it's getting into health care. It will have to work hard to match the sleaze of the health insurers, Big Pharma, drug middlemen, hospital monpolists, and others already in the business. http://www.reuters.com/... Evgeny Morozov / @evgenymorozov : The last thing we needed was Palantir becoming a big player in healthcare http://www.reuters.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 joint venture with Merck KGaA is the opening move in what became Palantir's health-data playbook: a private-sector beachhead selling cancer analytics to research centers while its core business remained government intelligence work. The reaction captured by Reuters — Dan Gillmor calling Palantir 'supremely creepy' and Evgeny Morozov questioning its entry into healthcare — set the privacy framing that has followed the company since.
The subsequent record shows the bet compounding: a $44.4M FDA deal to power drug reviews, COVID-era talks with France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland after the UK NHS engagement, internal plans to deepen NHS ties through acquisitions, and ultimately a £480M NHS contract with Accenture where patients cannot opt out of data sharing.
First-order effects
- Merck KGaA gains Palantir's data-integration capability inside Syntropy, giving cancer research centers a commercial analytics platform built by a company whose brand carries immediate privacy baggage among researchers and commentators like Gillmor and Morozov.
Second-order effects
- The venture establishes healthcare as a sellable market for Palantir beyond government clients — the template later monetized through the FDA drug-review contract and successive European public-health engagements, forcing incumbent health-data vendors to compete against a firm with intelligence-grade tooling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, national health-data infrastructure consolidates around a small set of large vendors, with the NHS's federated platform — and the opt-out controversy attached to it — as the test case for whether public health systems accept concentrated private control over patient data.
The trend: Palantir's expansion from intelligence and defense work into civilian health-data infrastructure, first through pharma partnerships like Syntropy and then through public contracts such as the FDA and NHS deals.