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Kristen Pembroke, client services director at Catchword, an Oakland branding firm that serves many tech and life sciences companies, said in an email that the obscurity of \u201cverily\u201d could foster the company\u2019s ability to \u201cevolve its mission and vision over time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cVerily is easy to pronounce and approachable,\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, some may find the tonality to be light and whimsical \u2014\u00a0verily sounds similar to merrily, for instance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company was spun off from Google a few months ago within Alphabet, a holding company for Google itself and affiliated entities. Verily has built a multidisciplinary team of doctors, engineers, chemists, and data gurus to tackle big mysteries of disease prevention and health. As a sign of seriousness about the bigger picture, Verily has a staff philosopher. \u201cWe have to understand the \u2018why\u2019 of what people do,\u201d Conrad said. \u201cA philosopher might be as important as a chemist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Verily evolved out of a Google-designed contact lens for diabetics that continuously monitors glucose in tears. The company is targeting health issues that affect millions, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mental health. It\u2019s producing other wearable medical devices and miniature sensors, such as a nanoparticle-based diagnostic tool to detect cancer or other ailments at very early stages.<\/p>\n
Verily\u2019s \u201cbaseline\u201d study of human health, chief medical officer Dr. Jessica Mega said in a recent interview with STAT, is an effort to grasp what we call \u201chealthy.\u201d A goal, she said, is to prevent disease by understanding human variability well enough to create individualized treatments that might be based on biological, genetic, behavioral, and environmental data.<\/p>\n
Verily\u2019s ambitions dwarf its staff of a few hundred employees on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and at a small office in Cambridge, Mass. Conrad and Mega said they plan other collaborations like those they have in progress with pharma giant Novartis to commercialize\u00a0their contact lens, and with universities such as Stanford and Duke on the baseline study.<\/p>\n
For all of Verily\u2019s grand ambitions, Conrad hinted at caution, if not humility, paraphrasing Clarence Darrow, the great lawyer and civil libertarian: \u201cWe don\u2019t claim to know what other ignorant men are sure of.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Source:\u00a0statnews.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Google Life Sciences, the Silicon Valley giant\u2019s new foray into health and medicine, announced a new name Monday that slips easily off the tongue but might sound antiquated to a high-tech, life-sciences ear: Verily. \u201cVerily, I swear,\u201d as\u00a0Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII. The word means \u201ctruly\u201d or \u201ccertainly.\u201d It dates back to 13th century Middle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":18223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[18],"yoast_head":"\n