The
company is turning the team that develops smart contact lenses and
other healthcare initiatives into a full-fledged, standalone company
rather than a lab project.
The
life sciences group will "graduate" from the Google X labs and become
its own separate company under the new Alphabet corporate structure,
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said on Thursday.
Andy Conrad, a molecular biologist who joined Google in 2013, will be the CEO of the new company, Brin said. "While
the reporting structure will be different, their goal remains the same.
They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new
technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing—and,
hopefully—transform the way we detect, prevent, and manage disease,"
Brin explained.
The move follows Google's announcement last week of a massive overhaul of its corporate structure.
What was once Google will become a holding company called Alphabet,
made up of several individual companies including Google's traditional
Web businesses (search, maps, YouTube, Android, and so on), Nest
(Google's home appliances group) and Fiber (Google's high speed Internet
delivery service).
Google
X, the research lab for projects such as self-driving cars and airborne
wind turbines, will also become a separate subsidiary within Alphabet.(Google) Google's smart contract lens
