Reinventing medical research
Verily is an Alphabet spin-off formerly known as Google Life Sciences, dedicated to research in the health sciences, which aims to carry out one of the most ambitious research projects in the the field of medicine: a longitudinal study of more than 10,000 candidates over more than a decade.
The idea behind Project Baseline is to use the technology currently available to provide a detailed follow-up of 10,000 people living near one of the three clinics included in the experiment (Stanford, Duke and California Health & Longevity Institute). Throughout the study, volunteers, who will not receive any financial compensation, will be subject to rigorous monitoring and scrutiny, which will include periodic analytical and diagnostic tests of various types, the use of devices to record their physical activity sensors under their bed to evaluate sleep quality, complete sequencing of their genome, etc. Their medical data will be shared with the company, which may also exploit it through partnerships with pharmaceutical companies or medical research teams, based on privacy protection.
Over the course of the study, a certain percentage of volunteers will inevitably suffer ailments of various types, which will also be studied in detail to try to establish causal relationships between the data that have been generated and the origin, evolution or transmission of their disorder. Anyone who knows in some detail the processes involved in biomedical research will quickly realize that with projects of this type, just as with the Apple ResearchKit I discussed about two years ago, we are actually radically reinventing research in health sciences, accessing sample sizes previously unimaginable, along with an unprecedented volume of data and level of detail.
In reality, what we are looking at here is the true digital transformation of biomedical research, with all that entails: radical changes in patient relationships, total redefinition of the internal processes to orient them completely toward the generation and analysis of data, along with platforms to enable the entry of a range of partners able to enrich or benefit each other from the project.
What advances in the biomedical field will arise from the approach of studies like this? What kind of advances can we expect from scaling biomedical research at these levels and leveraging it on the basis of today’s technological environment?
(En español, aquí)
