MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Technology titan Google (NSDQ:GOOG) is taking new interest in human health in the latest "moonshot" project coming out of its ambitious "X" lab, famous for self-driving cars and Google Glass.
The new Baseline Study will collect and analyze genomic and molecular data, starting with 175 volunteers and expanding eventually to thousands of participants, to built a rich database of human health.
First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the project is the latest Google initiative that breaches the narrowing divide between technology and medicine, joining the company’s Calico life-extension project and the newer "smart" contact lenses for measuring blood glucose and other biomarkers.
According to the Journal:
Other mass medical and genomics studies exist. But Baseline will amass a much larger and broader set of new data. The hope is that this will help researchers detect killers such as heart disease and cancer far earlier, pushing medicine more toward prevention rather than the treatment of illness.
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