Google’s quest in the human body research, and attempts towards prevention and curing diseases just got bigger. Google X’s Life Sciences Division has announced it is going stand alone from Google X and will now be a part of the recently created Alphabet.
The news came in the form Sergey Brin’s Google+ post, stating “While the reporting structure will be different, their goal remains the same,” Brin wrote in the Google+ post. “They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing — and, hopefully — transform the way we detect, prevent, and manage disease.”
The project will be headed by Andy Conrad as chief executive. Conrad was the head of Google Life Sciences prior to his latest stint. He has previously been the chief scientific officer at LabCorp and the co-founder of the National Genetics Institute. He leads more than 150 scientists who come from fields as wide-ranging as astrophysics, programming, theoretical math, and oncology.
The life sciences division of Google X is a research organization studying life sciences. The organization is a division of Google X, which is a semi-secret facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological advancements. The founders of Google have said that the company will not be a health research organization.
The division had acquired Lift Labs in September 2014. Their product Liftware Spoon is a spoon for people with tremors.
The Google X team, best known for its Google Contact Lens(which aims to assist people with diabetes by constantly measuring the glucose levels in their tears) and Baseline Study that is a project to collect genetic and molecular information from enough people to create a picture of what a healthy human should be is all set to shift the focus of healthcare to a targeted approach and in the words of Larry Page “fixing the most basic problems afflicting human health.”
