The partnership between Ancestry and Calico has ended after three years, Business Insider reports. Calico, which is funded by Alphabet, Google's parent company, is focused on aging and well being.
It adds that the two were tight-lipped about their partnership. When it began in 2015, Ancestry's Ken Chahine told Business Insider that Calico was interested in using Ancestry's dataset to uncover people who belonged to families that tended to live longer than others. Ancestry, it notes, has a database of data on millions of customers, and this could have allowed Calico to tease out gene variants common among those with longer than typical lifespans.
"Our common experience suggests that there may be hereditary factors underlying longevity, but finding the genes responsible using standard techniques has proven elusive," Calico CSO David Botstein said in a statement in 2015, according to GenomeWeb. "This is an extraordinary opportunity to address a fundamental unanswered question in longevity research using high-quality human pedigrees."
While neither company has published anything stemming from the partnership, Calico tells Business Insider that some of its research is to appear in a peer-reviewed journal soon.