Alphabet's Verily spinout has snatched up software, hardware, and sensor development engineers as well as computational and cell biologists, Ron Leuty from the San Francisco Business Times reports. These 45 new hires, he notes, gives a glimpse into the projects that Verily has embarked upon.
The San Francisco Business Times scoured LinkedIn to find these new Verily employees, and it notes that the company has about 20 job listings on its website, including posts for an immunologist, optical engineer, and genomics scientist.
"It's a good thing," Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, tells Leuty. "A big part of the tech presence — the invasion of medicine — is long overdue. The state of technology in medicine is outdated and pathetic, so it's very logical that Google, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Qualcomm, IBM are getting into it."
While many of the new hires come from other parts of Google, especially GoogleX, Leuty reports that some hail from Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, and Illumina as well as from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford universities.
They also, he adds, reveal known Verily projects such as its work with Novartis to develop a contact lens for people with diabetes to tracks their blood glucose levels, its purchase of a company that had developed a spoon that offsets the shaking of Parkinson's disease patient, and its Baseline study to generate a picture of what a healthy human should look like.
The company also recently hired Thomas Insel away from the National Institute of Mental Health, Jessica Mega from Harvard Medical School, and John Hernandez from Abbott.