Announced in August 2015, Alphabet Inc. is a holding company that houses several companies owned by or tied to Google, including Google itself. The company has the amusing Web address abc.xyz (the extension ‘xyz’ is not available to the typical Internet user).
The project itself is serious, with big investment involved. The company is involved with various technological solutions including autonomous cars, smart household devices, Internet-delivering balloons and cutting-edge medical research. The formation includes the biotechnology company Calico and the research laboratory Google X.
Included in the new structure is Google’s (or rather Alphabet’s) life sciences team. The team, which does not have an official name yet, will work on new technologies, taking them from the research and development stage through to clinical testing.
In the past, Google’s life science team has, according to Controlled Environments, worked on:
A nanopill, designed to detect cancer
A sensor to monitor multiple sclerosis patients.
A baseline study that will create the richest portrait yet of the human body and genome.
A contact lens with an embedded chip to monitor blood sugar levels in diabetes patients.
The contact lens project is a partnership with pharmaceutical giant Novartis. With this device it acts as a health tracker. The lens deploys a small glucose sensor and a wireless chip. The chip transmits information collected from a chemical analysis of the tears of the person who is wearing the lens.
The life sciences team will be directed by Dr. Andy Conrad, who was formerly with Google X.
Writing on The Verge, Google co-founder and now-Alphabet president Sergey Brin explained: “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 team is relatively new but very diverse, including software engineers, oncologists, and optics experts. This is the type of company we hope will thrive as part of Alphabet and I can’t wait to see what they do next.”
