Google knows all about your habits and interests online. Now the search company's health spinout, Verily, is asking 10,000 Americans for intimate knowledge of their bodies.
Verily today published a website that marks the launch of its founding idea, the Baseline Project, a multi-year study expected to cost more than $100 million that it says will search for clues to predicting heart disease and cancer.
Volunteers are being asked to submit to an unprecedented regimen of tests and physical monitoring. They'll be asked to wear a heart-tracking watch that follows their pulse and movements in real time and will undergo a detailed workup of x-rays and heart scans, in addition to having their genomes deciphered and their blood tested in so-called liquid biopsies, which might be able to catch cancer early.
Each volunteer will be monitored for four years. As enrolling 10,000 people will take time, the full study could take a decade to complete.
"No one has done this kind of deep dive on so many individuals. This depth has never been attempted," says Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, a physician researcher at Stanford University who is one of Baseline's investigators. "It's to enable generations to come to mine it, to ask questions, without presupposing what the questions are."
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604224/googles-massive-health-study-seeks-10000-volunteers-to-give-up-their-medical-secrets/?
