Google has launched a healthcare company to attack some of the most difficult scientific problems in diseases related to ageing, marking the biggest step yet beyond its core internet business

September 18, 2013 7:05 pm

Google launches healthcare company

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Google has launched a healthcare company to attack some of the most difficult scientific problems in diseases related to ageing, marking the biggest step yet beyond its core internet business. Larry Page, chief executive, unveiled the venture, called Calico, with a characteristically ambitious and vague claim that “with some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives”.While outlining a highly ambitious overall goal for the new company, however, Google did not disclose any information about how much it would invest in the venture, which areas of healthcare science the spin-off company would specialise in, or what the initiative was likely to lead to in terms of new products.

The new venture is to be headed by Art Levinson, the chairman of biotech company Genentech, which was bought by Roche in 2009. Mr Levinson is also the chairman of arch-rival Apple, as well as a former Google director, a role he had to abandon during a US antitrust investigation of overlapping directorships at a number of Silicon Valley companies.

Mr Page only described the investment as “very small by comparison to our core businesses”. However, the financial backing will still be big enough for Mr Levinson to build research and development operations in a number of areas, including biotech, said another person familiar with the initiative.

Google said it was “too early to discuss details” about potential privacy issues stemming from the new company, such as whether it would insulate healthcare data about patients from its broader advertising business.

Google’s big bets beyond the internet business so far have still stayed close to its skills in software and, increasingly, hardware devices. Most of these have been developed in its Google X advanced projects lab under co-founder Sergey Brin, including driverless car technology and the “smart” glasses it hopes to launch as a consumer product next year.

Google has also become one of the biggest Silicon Valley venture capitalists through its Google Ventures arm, investing in a wide range of technologies.

By backing Mr Levinson’s healthcare company, Google appeared to have embarked on a new form of expansion, though a company spokesperson refused to provide any more details about whether it involved investors other than Google and Mr Levinson himself, or who would control the company.

“OK  . . . so you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today,” Mr Page wrote in a post on the Google Plus+ network announcing the initiative.

He pointed back to the 2004 letter that he and Mr Brin wrote to shareholders at the time of the company’s initial public offering, when they promised to make unconventional long-term bets on big new opportunities and to “make the world a better place”.

“So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing internet businesses,” Mr Page said. He described the new company’s mission as “health and wellbeing, in particular the challenge of ageing and associated diseases”.