Alphabet spins out first company: The life sciences division of Google X

Previously, the department was part of the company’s X Labs, but has now taken up the L spot in Google’s Alphabet. They will collaborate with other life sciences organizations to advance new technologies from the R&D stage to clinical testing and revolutionize the manner diseases are sensed, managed and prevented.

The move from the internet firm may suggest that some of the life science projects hold enough potential to deserve their own separate corporate entity.

Andy Conrad, a co-founder of the National Genetics Institute who had been leading Life Sciences, becomes the new company’s chief executive. That makes it a likely candidate for the first moonshot Google X project to bear tangible fruit.

The news came in the form Sergey Brin’s Google+ post, stating “While the reporting structure will be different, their goal remains the same”, Brin wrote in the Google+ post.

The life sciences division of Google X is a research organization studying life sciences.

The team is relatively new but very diverse including software engineers, oncologists, and optics experts.

3 years ago we embarked on a project to put computing inside a contact lens – an immensely challenging technical problem with an important application to health.

Life Sciences has so far worked on projects that include a nanodiagnostics platform and a cardiac monitor. Combining expertise from the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, electrical engineering, computer science, we’re developing new technology tools for physicians that can integrate easily into daily life and help transform the detection, prevention, and management of disease. These days the search and advertising business is still a huge part of what Google does, but the company also develops the most popular smartphone operating system in the world, a web browser, and much more.

A legal dispute is unlikely since Google made clear in its announcement on Monday that in creating a parent company called Alphabet Inc, it was not intending to build products and brands under that name.