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Biological Chemistry

Remember Dr. McCoy?

by Bibiana Campos Seijo
September 14, 2015 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 93, Issue 36

Who remembers Dr. McCoy? This goes back a long way, but Leonard McCoy—often referred to as “Bones”—was the doctor from the TV series Star Trek. To be precise, he was the chief medical officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise under Captain Kirk. He’d carry this really cool device called a “tricorder,” a handheld computer with a detachable sensor that he would use to sense and diagnose medical conditions within seconds. I remember watching the program growing up and thinking he was awesome. It was, of course, science fiction: Along with teleportation, speech-driven computers, and handheld wireless communicators, the medical tricorder was one of the then-imaginary future technologies featured in “Star Trek.”

I was reminded of this because of the announcement at the end of August that French drugmaker Sanofi is partnering with technology giant Google to develop tools to improve the management and treatment of diabetes, including new blood glucose level sensor devices. Google will work on the analytics, electronics, and chip designs; Sanofi will produce an improved treatment regimen for both type 1 and types 2 diabetes.

But why would I link this announcement with “Star Trek”? Earlier this year at the BIO International Convention (the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s trade fair) in Philadelphia, I spoke about how technologies once considered science fiction are slowly turning into reality. The example I chose to make this case was the collaboration between Google X (this is what Google’s research arm used to be called) and Novartis to codevelop glucose-sensing contact lenses. Indeed, in 2014, Google unveiled smart contact lens technology that used tiny sensors to read blood sugar levels from tears. The eye care division of Novartis, Alcon, licensed this technology from Google, and the two companies are now working together to commercialize next-generation lens technology. In these smart lenses, the sensors are wirelessly connected to a patient’s smartphone to let them know whether they need insulin, providing a continual update.

This is a fantastic development, and it is close to getting to market. According to Google, human trials on the glucose-sensing contact lenses are likely to begin next year. But, as I said to my audience at the BIO event, for me the real “Star Trek” stuff would start if, after recording the reading off the eye, the lenses sent info to the smartphone, which then calculated the amount of insulin needed and told the patient—or even better, for those patients who use a pump, it went ahead and activated the device to deliver the insulin. That would be so clever. We’d have nothing to envy about McCoy’s tricorder.

In any case, it seems to me that Google’s collaborations with Novartis and Sanofi will advance the way that diabetes is managed and treated—potentially revolutionizing health care for millions of people who live with the disease around the world. This advancement is happening thanks to what one could still call “unusual” collaborations of tech firms with pharma and biotech companies. There is a lot of potential for growth at the interface between these two areas, which could change the way pharma and biotech operate as they look beyond their areas of expertise to continue to grow and evolve. I expect that in the future we’ll see more alliances involving pharma and medical device firms working with technology companies such as IBM, Apple, Intel, and Microsoft.

So far, Google is leading the way on this one. At Google’s new holding company, Alphabet, life sciences will become an independent, yet-unnamed division. Google is serious about life sciences, and they have been actively recruiting top scientific talent in many areas including nanoparticle engineering. The focus at Google is on “helping to move health care from reactive to proactive.” Besides their diabetes work, the firm is also said to be diving deep into genomics and working on a cancer-detecting pill that pairs with a wristband.

So who knows what will be next? If “Star Trek” is anything to go by, we should be looking at teleportation.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.

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