Former FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said today that he will be joining Verily Life Sciences, the medical arm of Google parent Alphabet (NSDQ:GOOGL).
Califf said that in addition to his spot at Verily, he will also join Duke University, where he will work with the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Califf will also serve as an adjunct professor of medicine at Stanford University’s department of medicine, according to a Verily blog post.
“I’m excited to turn to a new career with Verily and Duke University. Although we are in the midst of an explosion of capability in the worlds of computing and information, we are still learning how to translate this capacity into better health and healthcare. Bridging this gap has been a recurring theme of my career, and it’s at the heart of what I hope to accomplish at both institutions. I’ll readily admit that I’ve chosen an ambitious problem to tackle, but I hope I can do my part,” Califf wrote in a Verily Blog post.
Califf did not say specifically what role he would take at the company, but indicated that he would use his experience at the head of the FDA to “offer insights that will allow the company to better tailor its technologies to meet the needs of doctors, other providers, health systems and the patients they serve, and to drive evidence-based approaches that will enable continuous learning and improvement,” according to the blog post.
“This work will not be easy. And while I’m excited about what Verily brings to this undertaking, widespread engagement with these issues across the entire biomedical ecosystem is needed as well. My hope is that Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs nationwide will collaborate on building an environment capable of linking the more than 300 million people in the U.S. to information that helps them live healthy, productive lives. Within this broad mission, I’m particularly focused on bridging a growing divide that has led to unprecedented health disparities as functions of income, education, race, and geography. But as increasingly ubiquitous smartphones and other electronic devices allow more and more people to access amazing sources of information and knowledge, we have the essential means to reverse these trends,” Califf wrote.
In April, Verily said it launched a 4-year, 10,000-patient study looking to examine how people transition from healthy to sick and to identify additional disease risk factors.
The company will partner with Duke University and Stanford Medicine, with enrollments beginning in the coming months. Study participants will also be enrolled at the California Health and Longevity Institute in Westlake Village, Calif.
The study will be the 1st initiative of its “Project Baseline,” which looks to establish a baseline definition for health and what it means.
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