Google Life Sciences: Nano particle Sensor to Detect Illness Early
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
NANOPARTICLE SENSOR TO DETECT ILLNESS EARLY
Andrew Conrad, head of Google Lifesciences, has confirmed that the company is working on nanoparticle technology that would be swallowed, and used in combination with an external device to continuously monitor the blood to detect cancer, heart disease, and other health issues. It is known as the “Nanoparticle Platform.”
While the technology is in an early development stage, Conrad said that Google “has been able to “functionalize” the nano particles, using them to find a few cancer cells among a million normal ones.” He continued: “We’ve probably done hundreds of thousands of experiments exploring the parameters of nanoparticle binding, While there is still much work to be done, he said, “we would definitely hope that it’s years, not decades, until this is deployed.”
SOURCE
http://blog.applysci.com/?p=2790
Meet the Google X Life Sciences Team – University of California minted
Andrew Conrad, head of Google X’s Life Sciences team, shows colleagues Alberto Vitari and Marija Pavloic some of the instruments they will be using in the lab for biomedical research.
Andrew Conrad is leading a small but fast-growing effort at Google X to change the face of medicine. His Life Sciences division is working on a “smart” contact lens. It wants to use data to help prevent people from getting sick rather than just treat sick people. Scores of people from physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology are part of the team. He wears flip-flops to work.
Back in 2005, Conrad helped Dole Food Company chairman and billionaire David Murdock set up the North Carolina Research Campus, which studies health, nutrition and agriculture. Conrad hired experts from diverse fields such as physics, mathematics, zoology and molecular biology, putting them to work on powerful new medical devices like electron microscopes and gene synthesizers. They knew little about what their colleagues did, but Conrad hoped that together they might come up with new ways to treat diseases like cancer.
He is taking a similar approach at Google X, mushing together experts from disparate medical fields to produce health-care advances from the creative soup.
“Google X is one of the few places where the world’s best physicians and other scientists sit together in a cafeteria eating free food and figuring out how a smart contact lens should work,” Conrad said. “I have a strong belief that this will be fruitful.”
Who makes up the Life Sciences team? Here are five members, starting with the boss.
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