In a blog published this morning, Google's co-founder and Alphabet President Sergey Brin announced LIfe Sciences as the first new company created under the Alphabet umbrella. This does not come as a surprise since Alphabet CEO Larry Page had already announced that life sciences and biotechnology will be a core area of focus for the newly restructured corporation.
Despite the fact that this area is far removed from Google's core business and may not be financially self-sustaining in the short-term, it holds great potential and significant opportunity in the long-run. Life Sciences will work on a number of projects including:
- Smart contact lenses that will have the ability to monitor blood sugar levels of diabetics.
- Nanoparticles that will be able to detect and fight cancer.
- A baseline study that will create the richest portrait of the human body and genome.
The new company will be headed by Andy Conrad who was previously the head of Google Life Sciences. While nothing drastic will be done under the umbrella of Alphabet, there is no doubt that Google's future goals are geared towards humanity and may not be as appealing to Google's investors.
"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," wrote Brin. "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."
Brin also wrote that he is delighted at the progress the project has made so far and he had never imagined the growth life sciences has achieved. He is now confident that the life sciences team is now ready to graduate from the X lab and can now become a standalone Alphabet company.
Life Sciences will continue to work with other companies and will work towards moving new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing. The ultimate goal is to transform the way diseases are detected, prevented and managed.
Source: Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google and Alphabet President
Image Credit: Sergey Brin, Google.
