Verily, previously known as Google Life Sciences is about to change the world by engaging chemists, engineers, doctors and behavioural scientists into their interdisciplinary efforts to use data to identify symptoms of health and diseases. It is sharing the parent company Alphabet with Google and its many expanding businesses. It aims to truly understand health using sensors, digital medical record, Artificial Intelligence, and its processing power to prevent, detect, and manage disease.
“Verily” is an archaic English word which means truly or truthfully. It doesn’t quite roll of the tongue but Google wasn’t a familiar word either. Why would future-focused Google Life Sciences take up a name from such an old era? The goal of the venture is to get at the truth of illness and also what health looks like. As stated by the CEO Andy Conrad, “We can defeat Mother Nature only through the truth.”
Google Life Sciences renamed as Verily
Conrad states that their focus is to advance the conventional medical technologies. Be proactive, rather than reactive. And shift from intervention to prevention. They want to create a world where technology and life sciences are partners with a combined mission. This will help to uncover new truths regarding health and disease.
The company has got four teams working towards a combined goal to better prevent, detect and treat diseases.
Hardware Team: This team is developing tools and devices that are smaller, more convenient, and more powerful. Smaller devices can be involved more easily in day-to-day life to monitor conditions consistently and to notify when something is wrong.
Software Team: From our genes, to our DNAs and sleep patterns, everything is information. Software team is developing platforms, algorithms, and products to analyze complex health information. They try to recognize patterns that could signal early warnings, diagnose disease more accurately, or suggest a more helpful treatment. For instance, they suggest using wearable sensors along with the traditional clinical tests to analyze different biological, behavioural, physiological, and environmental variables. They can research on how different diseases progresses uniquely among individuals using computational techniques and machine learning algorithms.
Clinical Team: This team works to gather information which might be helpful to the health research community in the near future. Clinical team collaborates with the hardware and software teams to guide them on the product development so that they can meet the real-time medical needs. They apply latest technology to the study of diseases and health by partnering with relevant industry, hospitals, academic centers, government, and medical societies.
Science Team: This team is pursuing research to precisely understand the actions that resulted into cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Precision diagnostics and therapeutic delivery will be improved by using bio-molecular nanotechnology.
Verily will work on amazing projects in future such as smart contact lenses for diabetic patients. And also mysterious blood-sucking smartwatch. Its Baseline study tends to define what “healthy” is for human body. This would be the first “baseline” for health in the history of human race.
