Never mind telemedicine as a replacement for a doctor visit. Google X wants to create a pill that will not only find health problems when they first start to develop but do all the lab work for you as well.
Andrew Conrad, head of the Life Sciences team at the Google X research lab, announced the project on Tuesday at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJD Live conference.
Google said its nanoparticles would seek out and attach themselves to cells, proteins or other molecules in the body. The other half of the monitoring system is a wearable device with a magnet to attract and count the particles. Conrad said that pills covered with the nanoparticles would spread throughout the body and then be called back to the monitor to get a report on a person’s health.
TechCrunch reports:
This has all sorts of implications in medicine. According to a separately released statement from Google today, “Maybe there could be a test for the enzymes given off by arterial plaques that are about to rupture and cause a heart attack or stroke. Perhaps someone could develop a diagnostic for post-surgery or post-chemo cancer patients – that’s a lot of anxious people right there (note: we’d leave this ‘product development’ work to companies we’d license the tech to; they’d develop specific diagnostics and test them for efficacy and safety in clinical trials.”
This project is in the exploratory phases but Conrad was hopeful that we’d be seeing this technology in the hands of every doctor within the next decade. He also mentioned that his team has explored ways of not just detecting abnormal cells but also delivering medicine at the same time. “That’s certainly been discussed,” he said, but cautioned that this was something that needed to be carefully developed so that the nanoparticles had a chance to show what was happening in the body before destroying the cells.
So far 100 Google employees with expertise in astrophysics, chemistry and electrical engineering have taken part in the nanoparticle project.
