Google's new moonshot project could benefit the entire world

Jul 25, 2014 09:20 GMT  ·  By

For years, it hasn’t exactly been a secret that Google is looking to get involved and help improve the health of the world’s population.

The Wall Street Journal reports about the Baseline Study, a project the Internet company has created to collect anonymous genetic and molecular information from people to create a full picture of what a healthy human being should be.

The project will start with 175 people, but will later grow to include thousands of people. Andrew Conrad, a molecular biologist, is the one to lead the project. He’s known for inventing cheap tests for HIV in blood-plasma donations.

Baseline seeks to collect a broader set of data than what’s currently available. This will, hopefully, help researchers discover heart disease or cancer in much earlier stages, which would enable more medicine to be used to prevent, than to treat an illness.

The idea is far from new, in fact, but what Google wants to set out do so is create a perfect image.. “If we really wanted to be proactive, what would we need to know? You need to know what the fixed, well-running thing should look like,” Dr. Conrad said.

Since joining Google X in March 2013, Conrad has managed to build a team of researchers that has somewhere between 70 and 100 members. They’re all experts from various fields, such as molecular biology, optics, imaging, physiology and biochemistry.

They won’t look for ways to detect specific diseases only, although that’s going to be included in larger scope as well. It will, however, collect different samples using a range of diagnostic tools.

Google will then use its computing patterns to find patterns buried in the data. Ultimately, after much tinkering is done, researchers hope to be able to detect any disease before it becomes a problem.

Biomarkers aren’t anything new either, but those available right now usually related to late-stage diseases because that’s when patients go to get themselves treated. But researchers have been trying to get more info to be able to spot diseases earlier.

The team isn’t exactly sure where things will lead and what they’ll discover because there are still so many unknown things about the human body. Advances are, however, expected to happen, even if it’s a low speed.

The researchers are trying to stay away from putting a date on their study, trying to avoid making empty promises of curing some major disease only to fail later on.

Since this is Google we’re talking about here, there are some obvious privacy issues at play. Baseline will be monitored by institutional review boards, which oversee all medical research involving humans. The data obtained from the study will be controlled by boards run by the medical schools of Duke University and Stanford University.

Basically, Google won’t be allowed free rein to do whatever it wants with the data, especially since there are fears that harnessing all this information about the structure of thousands of human bodies could eventually lure Google to start making money by providing others, such as insurance company, with information.