There's an "L" in the Alphabet soup Google created earlier this month. That "L" under the umbrella of Google's newly formed parent company stands for "Life Sciences," a division of the Google X labs up until now.
Alphabet President Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and previous director of Google X, announced the Life Sciences' division's graduation.
"It's a huge undertaking, and I am delighted to announce that the life sciences team is now ready to graduate from our X lab and become a standalone Alphabet company, with Andy Conrad as CEO," Brin said.
The reporting structure will change, that's why Alphabet was created, but the Life Sciences' unit's goal will remain unchanged, according to Brin. The team will continue to collaborate with other life sciences companies to drive new tech from the research and development phase to clinical testing.
"The team is relatively new but very diverse including software engineers, oncologists, and optics experts," Brin said. "This is the type of company we hope will thrive as part of Alphabet and I can't wait to see what they do next."
Brin and crew started Google X's Life Sciences division about three years ago, when they began working on smart contact lenses. The group hopes to read glucose levels discretely someday since tears have been difficult to analyse so far.
"At Google[x], we wondered if miniaturized electronics-think: chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair-might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy," stated the Google X team in January 2014. There is an evidence suggesting that Google has been making progress on the lenses and could be ready for market soon.
In a patent application, published June 25, Google described packaging materials for a product that sounded a lot like its smart contact lenses. The application described an "eye-mountable device" that will rest on top of a pedestal in a container that could be "sealed by a lidstock."
