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Nikon and Verily team up to fight diabetes-related eye disease
Verily, Google's former Life Sciences division, teamed up with a French pharmaceutical company to help treat diabetes just a few months ago. Now, it has joined forces with Nikon to enhance the screening process for diabetic retinopathy and macular edema -- diabetes-related eye diseases and two of the leading causes of blindness in adults. They want to create machine learning-enabled retinal imaging technologies that can detect the diseases in their early stages. That way, doctors can step in and prevent the patients from going blind whenever possible.
Google Life Sciences is working on another diabetes-monitoring project
A few weeks ago, Google's Life Sciences division (which falls under Alphabet) announced plans to work with Dexcom on a miniature glucose tracker. The division that handles Mountain View's health-minded efforts is also teaming up with Sanofi, a pharmaceutical company that makes diabetes medication. The collaboration aims to find new ways to monitor and treat the medical condition that affects nearly 30 million people in the US alone. The partnership includes the development of a small device that continuously gathers stats and software that uses the collected info to find new courses of treatment. Life Sciences head Andrew Conrad says Sanofi's experience with insulin could help Google build a connected device that could provide dosage recommendation or automatically adjust medication levels based on a patient's blood sugar readings. "With Sanofi we can complete the picture of how diabetes unfolds and try to interrupt that development through a proactive and preventive approach," Conrad explained. This is the latest in the Life Sciences division's ongoing medical projects, and now that there's a renewed focus, we're likely to see more partnerships in the near future. [Image credit: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
