Tag: Calico

Building muscle at Calico, Google’s health moonshot

Google made waves in September when it launched its health research arm Calico, led by Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of Roche's US biotech company Genentech. Calico has now announced the hire of four heavy-hitters from the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.  Not surprisingly, three of them have connections with Genentech.  Dr Hal Barron was chief medical officer of Roche, which acquired Genentech in 2009 for $50bn.  He becomes president of R&D at Calico. Dr David Botstein, who joins Calico as chief scientific officer, was VP of Genentech in the late 1980s before moving to academia at Princeton, and Dr Bob Cohen leaves...

What is Calico?

The launch last week of Google's Calico - California Life Company - is an important step in the battle against ageing.  But we still don't know whether it is a head-on charge against death itself, or an incremental approach, tackling individual diseases with Big Data.  The distinction is, well, a matter of life and death. Aubrey de Grey is Chief Science Officer of SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.  He thinks that by repairing seven types of molecular and cellular damage to the body which are caused by our basic metabolic processes, we can halt the ageing...