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Tag: Calico

  • Google’s Calico Partners With AbbVie, Will Open R&D Facility

    The ball is starting to get rolling with Google’s anti-aging company Calico. As reported recently, it now has a website, and today, the site added its first piece of news.

    Calico has partnered with AbbVie to co-invest in an R&D collaboration. The announcement says they “may” co-invest $1.5 billion. Calico will also be creating a R&D facility in the Bay Area to focus on aging and age-related diseases, including neurodegeneration and cancer.

    The two companies will combine their “complementary strengths to accelerate the availability of new therapies for age-related diseases,” as they put it.

    “This collaboration demonstrates our commitment to exploring new areas of medicine and innovative approaches to drug discovery and development that augments our already robust pipeline,” said Richard A. Gonzalez, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, AbbVie. “We are pleased to be working with such outstanding scientists as Art Levinson, Hal Barron and their team. The potential to help improve patients’ lives with new therapies is enormous.”

    “Our relationship with AbbVie is a pivotal event for Calico, whose mission is to develop life-enhancing therapies for people with age-related diseases. It will greatly accelerate our efforts to understand the science of aging, advance our clinical work, and help bring important therapies to patients everywhere,” said Art Levinson, CEO and founder of Calico.

    Both companies will initially provide up to $250 million to fund the collaboration with the potential for both to contribute an additional $500 million. Both will share costs and profits equally.

    Calico will start filling “critical” positions immediately, with plans to establish a “substantial” team of scientists and research staff.

    Image via Calico

  • Jason Hope And Google Founders Seek Cures For Heart Disease, Cancer

    In 2010, Jason Hope joined Peter Thiel’s bold $3.5 million commitment to ending aging by making a $500,000 donation to the SENS foundation at an event Mr, Thiel held for SENS.  The SENS Foundation is the world’s foremost anti-aging lab, working on cutting edge technologies to cure the world’s worst diseases including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and many others.


    Peter Thiel regularly donates in the general range of $1 million annually to the foundation and has been matched by Jason Hope for the last two years.
     
    Many now consider Mr. Hope and Mr. Thiel visionaries in the anti-aging space as the virgin industry is beginning to explode.  Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page recently announced they were investing over $100 million dollars into forming a new Google Company called Calico, with the incredible goal of curing aging.  

    Art Levinson, the famed former CEO and current board chairman of Genentech, has been tapped as CEO.  Genentech is the world’s first biotech company, and its founding in 1976 marked the beginning of the accelerating march of technology’s impact on biology.  Genentech has made the world a better place for hundreds of millions of people and has grown to be valued at more than $100 billion in less than 40 years.  Art Levinson is also the Chairman of Apple, the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of over half a trillion (yes, trillion) dollars.
     
    Technology has been experiencing exponentially accelerating growth for some time and we are now at this tipping point where technology is close to allowing us to cure all the diseases of aging within the next few decades. The investment of significant dollars into this endeavor by the world’s foremost tech leaders truly signals the onset of this inevitability.

  • Google’s Anti-Aging Company Calico Gets A Website

    As you may recall, Google announced the formation of a new company called Calico lat fall, aimed at studying aging and its effects on health and well-being (or as some us put it, keeping us from dying).

    SFGate discovered (via Business Insider) that Calico now has a website up at CalicoLabs.com.

    Here’s what it says:

    We’re tackling aging, one of life’s greatest mysteries.

    Calico is a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan. We will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives. Executing on this mission will require an unprecedented level of interdisciplinary effort and a long-term focus for which funding is already in place.

    It goes on to say that Calico is made up of scientists from the fields of medicine, drug development, molecular biology, and genetics, and shows off the team:

    It also says, it will post career opportunities as they become available, and that its ability to handle press inquiries will be limited, but does include an email address for such inquiries.

    Image via Calico

  • Arthur Levinson Talks About Calico, Google’s New Death-Fighting Company

    Arthur Levinson Talks About Calico, Google’s New Death-Fighting Company

    As you may have heard by now, Google has started a new company called Calico aimed at figuring out how to extend human life. In other words, fighting death.

    The news broke in a Time Magazine cover story, which was quickly followed by a Google+ Post from Google CEO Larry Page and a press release about the initiative.

    The company is to be run by Arthur Levinson, the former CEO and Chairman of Genentech and current Chairman of Apple. He has also taken to Google+ to talk about Calico (and clarify what the name is about):


    A lot of people are obviously skeptical about Calico’s quest to “solve death”. The business editor at the MIT Technology Review had this to say:

    Google didn’t disclose how much money the company had raised. But if it’s primarily an investment by its venture arm, the amount is likely to be vanishingly small compared to the $31 billion spent on biomedical research each year by the National Institutes of Health, and billions upon billions more spent by drug companies.

    This isn’t the first time Google has ventured from its core businesses in computing with grandiose claims that it can fix some huge social problem. The search giant previously sought to produce zero-carbon energy at massive scales, but backed away from that research after it found that inventing new energy technology wasn’t so easy (see “Google’s Search for Clean Energy”.)

    He then suggested that if Page is serious about medical research, he should start with his own search engine, noting that paid ads promoting what amount to “pure snake oil” still appear at the top of Google’s results for health-related queries.

    To be fair, from what I’ve seen, Google hasn’t actually said that Calico is focused on solving death. In fact, none of the announcements specifically say anything about “death”. They just said Calico is focused on health and well-being, “in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases”.

    So yeah, that still sounds like they have the goal of extending life, which is essentially solving death, but Google is not out there saying, “We’re going to solve death.”

    It does make for an attention-grabbing headline though. And it still seems like a good place for wealthy tech giants to focus some time and money.

    Image: Google+

  • Google Starts Calico To Keep You From Dying

    Google announced the creation of a new company called Calico today. According to Google, it will focus on health and well-being with an eye specifically on aging and diseases associated with it. Simply put, they want to figure out how to extend life.

    Calico will be led by Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Apple Chairman Arthur Levinson, who will remain Chairman of Genentech and a director of Hoffmann-La Roche, as well as Chairman of Apple.

    Google CEO Larry Page said, “Illness and aging affect all our families. With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives. It’s impossible to imagine anyone better than Art—one of the leading scientists, entrepreneurs and CEOs of our generation—to take this new venture forward.”

    Levinson said, “I’ve devoted much of my life to science and technology, with the goal of improving human health. Larry’s focus on outsized improvements has inspired me, and I’m tremendously excited about what’s next.”

    Page discussed the initiative further in a Google+ post:



    Apple CEO Tim Cook also offered a comment for Google’s announcement, “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.”

    I’d say the world will be pretty excited to see them too.

    Google has had some pretty ambitious ideas in recent years, but investing in prolonging life has to trump even self-driving cars.

    Now, let the Google vs. evil conversation continue…

    See Also: Arthur Levinson Talks About Calico, Google’s New Death-Fighting Company

    Image: Thinkstock