Google's Ambitious Life Sciences Unit Gets a New Name: Verily

Google's Ambitious Life Sciences Unit Gets a New Name: Verily
December 8, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

Google’s Life Sciences, the first spinoff to stand alone under the new Alphabet umbrella, has a new name It will now be called Verily.

On the new company’s website, it states, “Imagine a chemist and an engineer and a doctor and a behavioral scientist, all working together to truly understand health and to prevent, detect, and manage disease. Picture a world in which technology and life sciences are not distinct, but partners with a unified mission.”

Andy Conrad will continue as the company’s chief executive officer. Jessica Mega, will act as chief medical officer. She recently joined from Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, where she headed up the Baseline Study.

Projects Verily will be undertaking include developing a contact lens that can monitor a diabetic’s blood glucose level, as well as other small devices to monitor health metrics. A video on the newly named company’s website said, “There’s no manual for the human body. A new car has up to 400 different sensors. You know the oil pressure. You know how much air is in your times. But we don’t do that with people.”

That’s not exactly revolutionary. IBM has been using its Watson supercomputer for diagnostics, and Apple and Fitbit have been charging headfirst into health monitoring. But Google is nothing if not ambitious. In a broad sense, Verily 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.”

A company spokesman told TechCrunch, “Verily is a new company that is focused on bringing together technology, science and medicine in the places where we think we can have the biggest impact on the detection, management, and prevention of disease. It was formerly known as the life science team at Google and is part of Alphabet.”

The restructuring of Google under Alphabet creates companies with more focus that can operate individually. Google itself will focus on Search, YouTube, Gmail, Android, Maps, and Ads. Google X will focus on tech advances like Google Glass, drones and the self-driving car.

GoogleFiber brings in high-speed Internet up to 100 times faster than typical Internet connections. Google Ventures invests in startup companies. Google Capital funds existing companies like Survey Monkey.

Calico is a research-and-development company focused on extending life. Nest is working on improving home products like smoke alarms and thermostats.

Verily, for those not up on their Shakespearean vocabulary, means “truly or truthfully.” Or, as FastCompany points out, “forsooth, if you’d like to stick to the vintage-language menu. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. We can imagine Elmer Fudd or the priest from The Princess Bride struggling with it. But then, Google wasn’t always a household word, either.”

Perhaps one thing that Verily will do, and this is something that Google does very well, is make sense of huge amounts of data. Healthcare is essentially data management, and the amount of data possible to collect from a single person is enormous, although mostly patients coming to a physician provide a large amount of very focused data—heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, various physical complaints, a limited number of lab tests, and the acquisition of information related to symptoms.

But now, with the acquisition of anything from genomic testing, full-body scans, and the metrics provided by things like Android Wear OS for smart watches or Fitbit, an exponentially larger amount of data can be made available, although no physician would currently be in a position to sift through it. Which may be where Verily comes in.

Other companies doing similar things are PatientsLikeMe, Patient Crossroads, and Matchmaker Exchange. “It’s unclear yet how Verily will add to or compete with these efforts,” says FastCompany, “though Google Life Sciences already had established major partnerships with institutions like Stanford and universities.”

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