Google, Sanofi Team Up on Diabetes Research

Google Inc. said Monday its health-care-research unit agreed to work with European pharmaceutical major Sanofi SA on new ways to monitor and treat diabetes.

The companies declined to say how much they are investing in the partnership.

Sanofi is a leading maker of diabetes medication, as well as many other drugs. Google's Life Sciences division is working on small, connected medical devices to continuously collect diabetes-related data, as well as software that learns from the information to find new treatments. Diabetes is expected to affect 592 million people world-wide by 2035, according to the International Diabetes Federation.

Pascale Witz, head of Sanofi's Global Diabetes and Cardiovascular Care business, is leading the collaboration.

Google Life Sciences, led by Andrew Conrad, started about two years ago as part of the company's ambitious goal to expand beyond its Internet search roots into big industries such as health care and transportation. Some of these efforts have stumbled, but Google Life Sciences has made steady progress through in-house research and partnerships with companies such as Novartis AG and Biogen Inc. The life-sciences division will become a stand-alone unit in Google's planned reorganization into a holding company called Alphabet Inc.

Mr. Conrad said the Sanofi partnership is the latest of several collaborations that combine expertise in medication, medical devices, software and computing infrastructure. That multidisciplined approach is needed to effectively treat diabetes, but has been rare to date, he explained.

An existing partnership with Novartis's Alcon eye-care division aims to take a Google-designed contact lens that measures glucose in tears of diabetics into high-volume production and large-scale human trials overseen by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2016.

Another Google partnership with Dexcom Inc., a maker of continuous glucose-monitoring devices, is developing a cheap, disposable device the size of a Band-Aid that can be worn on the skin and send blood-sugar measurements to a smartphone, as well as Google.

"With Sanofi we can complete the picture of how diabetes unfolds and try to interrupt that development through a proactive and preventive approach," Mr. Conrad said in an interview.

He said Sanofi's experience making insulin—which controls diabetics' blood sugar levels—might help Google design smaller, Internet-connected devices that could automatically suggest or adjust insulin dosages in response to blood-sugar readings or doctor-prescribed patient exercise regimes.

Diabetes treatments accounted for 21% of Sanofi's 2014 revenue of €34 billion ($38 billion). But the business is under pressure as its top-selling Lantus insulin loses patent protection this year. Reviving this business is a priority for new Chief Executive Olivier Brandicourt and teaming up with Google Life Sciences may help.

"Our goal is to provide holistic, integrated solutions that combine medicines, devices, technologies and services, to improve patient outcomes," Ms. Witz said in an email.

Write to Alistair Barr at [e-mail]

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 31, 2015 11:05 ET (15:05 GMT)

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