Google's Life Sciences Rebrands Under Alphabet
What the revamped venture hopes to achieve.
— -- Alphabet, the parent company of Google, can now add a V to its alphabet soup of companies.
What was formerly known as the Life Sciences division at Google X has now been revamped as Verily.
"Imagine a chemist and an engineer and a doctor and a behavioral scientist, all working together to truly understand health and to better prevent, detect, and manage disease. Picture a world in which technology and life sciences are not distinct, but partners with a united mission," the company's new website said. "At Verity, that's the world we want to create."
Verily, which means truth, will be tasked with developing a better understanding of disease at the individual level, creating smart devices that can give insights into a person's health.
"Smaller devices fit more easily into daily life so they can monitor conditions more consistently and proactively signal when something is amiss," Verily's website said. "For example, we are currently partnering to develop a contact lens with an embedded glucose sensor."
That smart contact lens could allow people with diabetes to keep track of their glucose, which could be measured in their tears, according to the company.
Announced in August, the surprise decision to slim down Google and make it a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet is intended to allow each company to focus on what it does best.
Google has always been a search engine and advertising business at its core but over the years it's grown into a company with diverse interests ranging from self-driving cars to home automation systems. The idea of Alphabet is to spin off some of those businesses from Google.
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