Calico (California Life Company), a firm established by Google in 2013, has recently partnered with AbbVie, a biotechnology company built from splitting with Abbott Labs, to create a research and development facility. It will be located in Bay Area, though the exact location hasn't been released yet.
This recent partnership will work toward developing life-enhancing drugs and therapies that can treat or cure nerve degeneration issues and diseases like cancer, especially among older men and women.
The current death rate is 807.3 per 100,000 people. On the average, the life expectancy is around 78 years old. Some of the most common non-accident causes of death are heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, influenza, pneumonia, and kidney-related disorders. If these two companies succeed, the drugs can certainly extend human lives significantly.
In the agreement, Calico will take the lead by controlling most of its research and development during the initial phases. After that, AbbVie will perform most of the job, which will already focus on determining the drugs' commercial viability through clinical trials. It will also manage the commercial production of the drugs and therapies should the researches become successful.
To begin the construction of the facility quickly, both companies have pledged to give $250 million in the hopes of increasing it to $1.5 billion. Google is also expected to contribute a significant amount of money.
Depending on how the researches will fare especially during the first five years, they will add $500 million more. All profits from the sale of developed drugs in the future will then be divided 50-50 between these two companies.
Google has already proven itself in computing by building one of the biggest and the most popular search engine in the world. Today it aims to compete in the health care and technology department by setting up Calico, which is being run by some of the biggest names in biopharmaceutical industry such as Dr. Robert Cohen from Genentech and Hal V. Barron from Roche.
AbbVie, meanwhile, currently has more than 20,000 employees in over 150 countries.
