“Tom is coming on board to explore how the life sciences team at Google could have an impact on the huge challenges related to understanding, diagnosing, and treating mental illness”, the company said in a statement.
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Insel, MD, leaves the National Institute of Mental Health after setting in motion a series of projects that will pair personalized medicine with improved detection and prevention of major mental health disorders.
Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the umbrella organization for the NIMH and other agencies, has appointed Dr. Bruce Cuthbert as acting director until a new permanent director is found.
The announcement was made this Tuesday, but Insel will stay with the NIMH until November 1; he is expected to join the life sciences team sometime after this date. The company is hard at work on new healthcare technologies, Insel pointed out, including a glucose-monitoring contact lens that it is developing with Swiss drugmaker Novartis ($NVS). I am joining the team to explore how this mission can be applied to mental illness.
By turning initiatives such as life sciences, which had previously been an experimental project within the Google X research labs, into freestanding business units, chief executive Larry Page hopes to push Google faster into big new markets unrelated to its core internet business.
During his earlier visits to the Silicon Valley, Insel had written on his blog about how contribution of tech giants can be fruitful. But the organization has not yet announced any efforts to address mental illness. “We’re thrilled that he is becoming a member of the workforce and look ahead to sharing extra as soon as he has an opportunity to rise up and operating”.
According to NIMH, in 2013 it was estimated that 18.5 percent of all U.S. adults were suffering from a mental illness, ranging from substance-use disorders to mental, behavioural, or emotional disorders.
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With molecular biologist Andy Conrad as its CEO, Alphabet’s as-yet-unnamed life sciences company has said diabetes will be its first major focus, but the hiring of Insel and job postings looking for bioinformatics and computational biology engineers and a wide range of other talent show a much broader mission for the fledgling firm.
