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Highlander Health, the clinical trial startup co-founded by former Verily execs Amy Abernethy and Brad Hirsch, is acquiring data company Target RWE. Launched in September , Highlander wants to make it cheaper and faster to get a drug to approval without compromising on data. The organization has two parts: Highlander Health Institute, which provides grants to health systems researching ways to use data collected during care as part of clinical trials, and Highlander Health Partners, which is investing in companies it thinks have the potential to improve clinical trials. The acquisition of Target RWE is Highlander Health Partners’ first investment. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Durham, North Carolina-based Target RWE creates custom longitudinal datasets for organizations, starting with liver disease. Its relationships with health systems, experts and pharmaceutical companies, as well as its potential for helping clinical evidence generation become more efficient in the future, made it an appealing investment, Abernethy said. Abernethy and Hirsch are both oncologists, a profession that has long been trying to bring more data from health records into vetting treatments. “A lot of critical work has been done in oncology, and we can, all across the industry, learn from that,” Abernethy said. But, she said, the work Target RWE has done to set up relationships with health systems and experts as well as build out its methodology was a “key substrate and a natural opportunity to now start to show what this landscape looks like.” As part of the acquisition, Abernethy and Hirsch plan to work with Target RWE’s existing team to determine the company’s strategy. Hirsch said the plan is to do two to three similar investments over the next two years. “Our hope with Target RWE is that this is a 5- or 10-year journey that we’re going to be on with them to build the company to the next level,” Hirsch said. (This story is from our Health Tech newsletter. If you’d like to sign up, just click here. )