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...