Calico, the life sciences company funded by Google, on Wednesday announced a partnership with the biopharmaceutical firm AbbVie to pour up to $1.5 billion into a research facility focused on fighting age-related diseases.
The two companies will team up to create new drugs and therapies. Calico’s role will be to oversee the early development of drugs and guide them through the approval process with the US Food and Drug Administration.
AbbVie will also provide scientific and clinical support, and will use its commercial know-how to make sure new drugs are “widely available,” wrote Calico CEO Arthur Levinson, in a Google+ post. Levinson is the former CEO of biotech company Genentech and current chairman of Apple.
I – Word Understanding
age-related disease – a disease that increases frequency as a person’s age increases (also known as disease of the elderly)
II – Have Your Say
1. What do you consider the most challenging part of aging?
*Physical challenges
*Psychological challenges
*Cultural challenges
2. Celebrated inventor and singularity specialist Ray Kurzweil believes science is moving at such rapid speed that we will all be able to live forever, starting soon.
291 Google’s Calico to launch new facility for researching aging
