Google Steps Up Efforts to Use Artificial Intelligence in Health Care

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly seen as a tool in biopharma and life sciences to improve drug development. There is a bit of a resource lag because AI is expensive. For example, Google/Alphabet owns an AI laboratory called DeepMind. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported $650 million.

Google, as one of the biggest corporations on Earth, is very interested in the use of AI and health care.

“The fundamental underlying technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence are applicable to all manner of tasks,” Greg Corrado, a neuroscientist at Google, told NPR. And that’s true, “whether those are tasks in your daily life, like getting directions or sorting through emailing, or the kinds of tasks that doctors, nurses, clinicians and patients face every day.”

It’s probably not altruism that has brought Google and other tech companies to look at the life sciences and health care. John Moore, an industry analyst at Chilmark Research, told NPR, “It’s pretty hard to ignore a market that represents about 20 percent of [U.S.] GDP. So whether it’s Google or it’s Microsoft or it’s IBM or it’s Apple, everyone is taking a look at what they can do in the health care space.”

Alphabet’s Verily focuses on health. One project the company is working on is software that can diagnose diabetic retinopathy, which can cause blindness. It is being used in India. It is also working to develop contact lenses that can monitor blood sugar in diabetes patients.

Verily’s chief medical and scientific officer, cardiologist Jessica Mega, told NPR, “In each of these cases, you can use new technologies and new tools to solve a problem that’s right in front of you. In the case of surgical robotics, this idea of learning from one surgery to another becomes really important, because we should be constantly getting better.”