Calico, a life-extension company backed by Google, has partnered with big pharma AbbVie in order to “cure death” through researching and developing new drugs to solve diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.
The new $1.5 billion research center will feature Calico working on discovering new drugs while AbbVie will perform the clinical trials and potentially bring breakthrough drugs to the market.
Art Levinson, CEO and founder of Calico said, “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.”
Google CEO Larry Page expressed to Time, “One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.”
Personally, I’d rather see Google expend more energy on trying to cure cancer than figuring out how to make driverless cars safe on public roads.
We’ll monitor how the company’s quest to cure death unfolds.
