Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was originally published by fastcompany.com and can be viewed in full

Verily—formerly Google Life Sciences—a serious, interdisciplinary effort to use data to better identify signs of health and disease. Verily does describe well the goal of the venture—to get at the truth of not only illness but of what health looks like.

Verily joins an ever-growing effort to use big data for understanding diseases. PatientsLikeMe, for example, is an online community in which disease sufferers seek out other people with similar symptoms, and also provide health data for analysis. PatientCrossroads develops registries where patients with rare illnesses, such as genetic eye diseases, can upload their medical information so that experts can look for commonalities that lead to insights. Meanwhile, Matchmaker Exchange links medical databases so that a researcher at one hospital or institution can search the databases of several linked centers at once. It’s unclear yet how Verily will add to or compete with these efforts, though Google Life Sciences already had established major partnerships with institutions like Stanford and Duke universities.

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