Google’s Healthcare Ventures: Science Fiction or Fact?

Google’s life sciences ambitions keep getting bigger and ever more quixotic.

Case in point: The Internet search giant’s Verily unit (formerly its Life Sciences branch) teamed with British pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) early last month to launch a startup firm tasked with developing nerve-altering medical devices that could be used to treat various diseases. The two companies are investing up to £540 million ($700 million) over the next seven years to master bioelectronic medicine, a relatively new area of life sciences that involves altering nerve activity and sending signals to specific organs to reverse particular disease states.

GSK is spearheading research and development in this field, having created a $50 million bioelectronics venture fund in 2013 and a subsequent contest that promised $1 million to the best architects of nerve-attaching miniature implants to correcting faulty electrical signals between the body’s nervous system and organs. Altering these signals, GSK theorizes, could help asthmatics breathe easier, reduce intestinal inflammation, relieve arthritis pain, and treat scores of other chronic conditions, possibly even hypertension or sleep apnea. The company is in the early stages of animal testing its bioelectronic prototypes, but executives are hopeful the Verily partnership will expedite the advent of human trials, where the devices can prove their mettle against autoimmune conditions, diabetes, and endocrine disorders.

“It could be exquisitely specific and therefore both more efficacious and safer than most medicines used today,” Kris Famm, GSK’s head of bioelectronics, told Forbes last fall. “Instead of taking a traditional drug that binds to multiple targets throughout your body, imagine a device that attaches to an organ-specific neural circuit in the body, records and analyzes the electric signals it trades with your brain, and then rewrites the disease out of the code. We’re developing devices that don’t exist today.
We envision a device the size of a grain of rice that can be implanted or even injected, and possesses the intelligence to subtly modulate neural signals in real time.”

Transforming such science-fiction fantasy into a viable treatment option, however, will likely be challenging. GSK has already created a “nerve atlas”—basically, a map showing the relationship between all human nerves, organs, and disease processes—but lacks the necessary prowess to turn that knowledge into workable devices. By teaming with Verily, GSK gains expertise in miniaturization, wireless communication, and big-data analytics—three key ingredients of bioelectronics science.

“Ultimately, this becomes a signal-processing challenge and a data problem,” Verily Chief Technology Officer Brian Otis explained to Forbes in early August. “Of course Verily and Google have a lot of expertise in dealing with large amounts of data, making decisions based on the data, and then feeding back to the user. That’s why we think we can contribute in multiple ways to this.”

Such confidence is typical from Google executives. The company that revolutionized data communication/exchange is now attempting to duplicate its success in healthcare with pie-in-the-sky promises of cancer cures, early disease detection, and large-scale studies. Over the last three years, Verily officials have outlined plans for a Star Trek-like “Tricorder” tracking device for cancer; a glucose-sensing contact lens; and a billion-dollar “Baseline” study of human biology that will unlock the genetic and molecular secrets to healthy living. Yet none of those projects have, thus far, borne fruit.

Skeptics are critical of Google’s true intentions, accusing the company of hyping its disease-curing projects solely for marketing purposes, but a handful of former Verily employees blame unit leaders for the stalled ventures, claiming managers—particularly CEO Andrew Conrad—are ignorant to the complexities of biology. The workers say Conrad applies the “confident impatience” of computer engineering and “extravagant hype” to biotech ideas that demand rigorous peer review and years, if not decades, of painstaking work, according to a June report published on the Boston, Mass.-based health/medicine website STAT.

Verily contends it has hired many “seasoned and respected industry, academic, public health, and regulatory veterans who understand the complexity of biology and how long it takes to move from idea to device and/or therapy,” the STAT article stated. The company also defended its record, noting its projects were selected specifically because they are “inherently difficult. We, together with our partners, believe that we have technology, expertise, and insights that might make success attainable on very challenging projects.”

Its selection process and recruiting efforts, however, are not as well publicized as the projects themselves, leading some scientists and biotechnology industry experts to compare Verily to Theranos, the embattled blood-testing firm that touted hard-to-believe technology without proven results to support it. UC Berkeley business professor Jo-Ellen Pozner told STAT that both companies lack the “muscle”—i.e., peer-review validation or real proof—to justify all the hype.

Only time will tell whether Verily’s latest healthcare venture is strong enough to succeed. Otis claims the company is making “great progress” on several joint research programs with Alcon and other companies, as well as a partnership with Johnson & Johnson to develop robotic surgical systems. Moncef Slaoui, chairman of GSK’s global vaccines group and board chairman of Galvani Bioelectronics (its partnership with Verily), believes Google’s experience and technology pedigree will compliment the work GSK has already accomplished in bioelectronics.

“Verily has great engineering capabilities and also expertise in big data analytics,” he gushed to Forbes. “The chemistry between us is perfect.”

Spoken like a true propagandist.