SAN FRANCISCO — Verily, the life sciences-focused Google offshoot, has shelved the ambitious project to develop a glucose-sensing contact lens that inspired its founding.
In a blog post on Friday, Verily said it will put “on hold” its work on the contacts, which had been envisioned as a way to relieve people with diabetes of the need for needle sticks to test their blood sugar. The project was begun almost five years ago by Google — before the launch of Verily. Verily began a collaboration in 2014 with partner Alcon, a division of Novartis, to develop the lens.
Had the project worked, it could have overhauled the $10 billion diabetes monitoring market, because millions of patients must frequently calibrate their diet and insulin intake by drawing blood and measuring its glucose level.
A 2016 STAT investigation found that many researchers — both inside and outside of Verily — viewed the quest to develop such contacts as technically infeasible because tears are an unreliable fluid to use in measuring blood sugar.
In Verily’s mea culpa on Friday, it acknowledged just that. “Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device,” the blog post said.
These contacts were the idea that inspired Google co-founder Sergey Brin to create Verily. Like Google, Verily is a subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOG).
Separately from the glucose-sensing contacts project, Verily is also collaborating with Alcon on what it calls a “smart accommodating” contact lens for age-related farsightedness. That project suffered a delay in 2016, when the developers gave up on their goal to test it in people by the end of that year.
Verily is also working on what it terms a “smart intraocular” lens for improving sight after cataract surgery.
The work on the accommodating and intraocular lenses will continue, Verily’s blog post said.
About the Author Reprints
This is a great inspiring article.I am pretty much pleased with your good work.You put really very helpful information.
Nice innovation !
DUH!!
By starting with hyperbolic claims and projects, to scrambling to find alternatives, to ending one program after another, Verily is a clear example of how, a lot of money is not enough to secure success, if the leadership is clearly mediocre and incompetent. No matter, how famous and apparently successful such leadership might have been on paper.
I was diagnosed as type 2 last year, my weight was 125kg, my doctor wanted me to start insulin and encouraged a diet with an alarming amount of carbs, so I went to boots and bought a blood sugar tester that I used every day, and started on a Atkins type diet. I.e no carbs….. and when I say no carbs I really mean none. So lots of meats and fish, eggs etc. I also got some useful information here http://mydiabetesway.com/7-steps-to-health-and-the-big-diabetes-lie-review I gradually started loosing weight at a rate of 3kg per month and Im now 94kg, I have never taken insulin and in a few months I will be my target weight. my lifestyle can never go back to carbs, but I can have some nowerdays without my blood sugar increasing, so if I want a curry I can have a Nan bread with it but no rice chips etc. And to be honest when you cut out carbs you can eat a lot of really tasty things that help lose weight a fry up without the beans is fine, lamb chops and kebabs without the bread etc. The only downside is because of the extra fat intake I need to be doing daily cardio. I really believe doctors are offered too many incentives by drug companies and tend to love writing prescriptions instead of encouraging a positive change in our lifestyles.