Verily Life Sciences has announced that it is establishing a center in Israel. The company, which focuses on technology and uses AI to better understand health and prevent, detect and manage diseases, was formerly a unit of Google called Google Life Sciences, but is currently an independent subsidiary of Goole's parent company Alphabet.
Among other things, Verily has developed a digital platform for managing clinical research, which has already reached the market, and has been used in researching Covid. The company has also developed systems for managing chronic diseases. Verily has projects in the R&D stage for analyzing digital data terms, AI in pathology, smart management of insurance risks for health insurance, and more. In the past, the company was engaged in the development of a special spoon for people with tremors and contact lenses that could diagnose the level of sugar in the blood.
Six months ago Verily raised $700 million to begin commercialization of some of its developments. The financing round was led by Alphabet in participation with other funds.
The Israel center will be headed by Prof. Ehud Rivlin, who worked for Google Health in his capacity as a professor of computer science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
Rivlin said, "This is a wonderful vote of confidence that Verily chose Israel as one of the only places in the world in which it has a development center. We aree interested in being assisted by the talent in Israel and the Israeli ecosystem in order to make a major change in the world of medicine."
Google VP engineering and head of Google Israel R&D Center Prof. Yossi Matias said, "Google has already been working in Israel for 15 years and currently employs 1,600 engineers in all kinds of areas including the field of medicine. We have a very strong research group here in the health sector and in the AI sector. To bring Verily here is an upgrade in the field of medicine for us and it is excellent timing because this is an era when AI can make a huge difference in the field of health.
The establishment of the new center comes after a successful collaboration between Google Health (a branch of Google creating a repository of health records and data) and Jerusalem's Sha'arei Zedek Hospital, in the field of colonoscopy.
Verily's new Israel center will be located in Google's development centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa, said Prof. Dayan. Verily is hiring five people for key positions but it remains unclear how many will be in the entire team.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 5, 2021
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