According to Google, its life sciences division will work with the drug maker Sanofi on help fighting diabetes by digitizing the process of managing the disease.
Google may be still working on a name for its recently life sciences group, however, the new division already has a foe and that's diabetes. Google declared that the chronic disease will be the first illness to focus the resources of the life sciences division. Under the new Alphabet holding company, the life sciences division becomes a separate business.
The search giant company also announced its plans to work on a project with the aim to digitize how people manage their diabetes. For this purpose, Google is partnering with drug maker Sanofi in order to design new technologies that could help in that process.
Since patients with diabetes already use mobile apps to record their food intake, track fitness activities, log blood sugar levels and determine medication doses, Google explained that a specialized approach on integrating all these methods could help diabetics to easier achieve their target glucose levels.
According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine and cited by Google, at present only around half of patients with diabetes can achieve their target glucose levels. The medical consequences of not be able to manage diabetes include nerve damage, stroke and heart disease.
Neither Google nor Sanofi has explained more in details how the search giant's technology will be used by the pharmaceutical company. However, the goal is clear and consists in using Google technology including analytics tools, wearable devices and sensors to give patients and doctors more insight into better ways to manage diabetes.
For instance, Google technology could provide real-time information related to a patient's diet or insulin dosage or could help explain to a physician why a person's glucose level has suddenly spiked for several days.
Google Life Sciences chief Andy Conrad told Bloomberg that measurement devices and smart insulin could come out of the partnership of the company with Sanofi. For now, the financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
This is not the first research of Google's life sciences group into diabetes research. The company's division is also collaborating with drug company Novartis on creating a contact lens that could measure a person's blood sugar levels from the tears. Also, Google and medical device maker Dexcom announced earlier that they would collaborate on creating a small sensor connected to the cloud for monitoring continuously a person's glucose levels.
Once part of the secretive Google X research lab, The life sciences unit that was once part of Google X secretive research became now a company in itself under a massive reorganization at the search giant.
