Google Life Science partners with Sanofi to target diabetes

Google Life Science said on Monday that it has partnered with European pharmaceutical giant Sanofi to target treatment and monitoring of diabetes. Ahead of the announcement, Life Science had started working on small, connected medical gadgets that would continuously monitor data of diabetics.

The collaboration is not limited to Sanofi but extends to other drugmakers such as Novartis and Biogen. The partnerships combine their expertise in drugs, medical gadgets, software and computing infrastructure, says Andrew Conrad, leader of Life Sciences which began in 2013 as Google started expansion beyond its Internet search engine business.

When Google’s reorganisation into a holding company, Alphabet, happens, Life Science will become a stand-alone unit, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Life Sciences is approaching diabetes using a disease-centric approach instead of focusing on technology. “New technologies could make it simple for a physician to understand when a patient’s blood sugar is tracking high for days in a row or could offer new ways for a patient to get real-time information and specific guidance about diet or insulin dosage,” quotes Wired.

Google, in partnership with Alcon eye-care division of Novartis, is designing contact lens that measures sugar level in the tears of diabetics. The experiment is into high-volume manufacturing and large-scale human trials of the contact lens in 2016. It is being overseen by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Its deal with Dexcom, Google is developing an affordable, disposable device similar in size to a Band-Aid that is worn on the skin to continuously monitor glucose level. The information would be sent to a smartphone and remote computer servers as well as doctors.

Conrad said that Sanofi completes the diabetes picture “of how diabetes unfolds and try to interrupt that development through a proactive and preventive work. By tapping Sanofi’s specialisation in production of insulin, Google could design smaller devices connected to the Internet that could adjust or suggest automatically insulin dosage depending on glucose levels monitored or patient physical activity regimes prescribed by physicians.

The partnership with Google is timely for Sanofi which is losing its patent protection for its Lantus insulin this year, 2015. In 2014, Lantus and other diabetes drugs accounted for 21 percent of the company’s $38 billion revenue.

The market is a boom for pharmaceutical companies since 592 million people are expected to be afflicted by 2034 with the chronic ailment with no known cure yet, according to the International Diabetes Federation.

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