November 11, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
The American Heart Association (AHA) announced this week that it is teaming up with Google Life Sciences (GLS) to invest $50 million over five years to a single researcher and his or her team to work on coronary heart disease.
Google Life Science is the first standalone company launched under Google Inc.’s Alphabet, an umbrella company for Google and its subsidiaries. GLS is developing a smart contact lens to monitor blood sugar in a collaboration with Alcon Laboratories, Inc. , a division of Novartis , and has also developed a partnership with San Diego-based DexCom to develop a wearable glucose monitor, and a collaboration deal with Sanofi .
It also is launching a mental health initiative, which will be led by former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel.
One of Google’s other spinoffs is Calico, which is focused on longevity, extending and controlling lifespan, and other age-related diseases, including neurodegeneration and cancer.
In that Google has shown an interest in ambitious goals in diabetes, cancer, mental illness and longevity, it isn’t surprising that it’s turning its attention to the biggest cause of death globally, cardiovascular disease.
As part of the joint project, in early 2016, AHA and Google Life Science will form a Joint Leadership Group that will select the head of the new project. That person will receive the full $50 million over about five years, and will develop the program, recruit a cross-functional group of researchers, and spearhead the project’s efforts.
“This is a fundamentally different kind of model for funding innovation,” said Andy Conrad, chief executive officer of Google Life Sciences, in a statement. “The team leader will be able to bring together clinicians, engineers, designers, basic researchers and other experts to think in new ways about the causes of coronary heart disease. We’re already imaging the possibilities when a team like that has access to the full resources of both Google Life Sciences and the AHA — and we can’t wait to see what they discover.”
The project has been given the slogan of “1 Team, 1 Vision, $50,000,000.” Says Eric Topol, cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. to Nature, “This is like the last big disease for which Google didn’t have a strategy. In light of the other aggressive things Google is doing in this space, it shouldn’t be surprising.”
Applications for the position are due by February 14, 2016. Not much is known about what GLS and AHA are looking for, including what milestones will need to be met or what the project’s priorities will be. Nancy Brown, chief executive of AHA said on the AHA blog. “We intend to really change the way cardiovascular research is conducted.”
Conrad has suggested that he hopes the proposals can fit on a single piece of paper and that creative vision is the key. “It could be a teenager in Wisconsin who has a brilliant idea,” he said. “The best idea should triumph. We go in without bias. If we knew what the best answer was, we would be doing it. But don’t. So the thing is to ask people to contribute ideas and wise people will review them and act upon them.”
This has been the approach Google and Google X, it’s so-called “moonshot” projects, have taken — large and ambitious, rather than incremental. “We are really trying to make this an aspirational goal, knowing full well that we are not likely to get there all the way,” said Joseph Loscalzo, physician-in-chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “But we hope that we’ll get there much further along the way than if we conducted business as usual.”
Or perhaps it can all be summed up by Brown’s statement Sunday at the opening of the AHA’s Scientific Sessions event: “Game on.”
