Google’s health-care mega-project will track 10,000 Americans

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 four-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.

“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.”

Baseline was the initial project of Verily, formerly known as Google Life Sciences. But the effort, which was first announced in 2014, proved so complex that it took two and a half years to fully organize. The hope is to discover new biological predictors of disease, beyond the familiar ones like the relationship of glucose to diabetes.

“We need to continue to look for signals that may be actionable,” says Jessica Mega, Verily’s chief medical officer. “And we need to build out infrastructure to be able to do that. Those tools will be important for the health-care ecosystem. We are creating the infrastructure to deal with large health data sets.”

Mega declined to say how much the study will cost, but it’s likely to be extraordinarily expensive. Existing agreements involve payments of at least $41.5 million to Stanford and $33 million to Duke University, two of the sites that will be recruiting patients. Verily itself will carry out much of the molecular testing, including the sequencing of participants’ DNA.

The study calls for collecting volunteers’ stool, saliva, and even tears. An initial workup of scans and tests will last two full days for some participants. “We are not allowed to talk about the costs. But it’s one of the things that make this hard to so for anyone else to do, and why it hasn’t been done,” says Gambhir.

In addition to a watch, participants are given an electronic loop to place under their mattresses to record their sleep patterns. A router-sized device in a person’s home would then relay a record of their tossing and turning to Google’s servers. Joining the study also requires volunteers to give Verily access to their health records.

Experts say comprehensive data on so many people could be valuable but that real-time measurements on volunteers at home may prove hard to collect. “The question is why should people continue to give you data. You need a reason,” says Eric Hekler, a professor at Arizona State University who works with activity trackers. “People wear a wrist tracker for a few months, but even the burden of charging one will make them stop.