Boston Business Journal
$500M Google-backed diabetes startup will set up Cambridge HQ
By: Don Seiffert
A new Cambridge startup with half a billion dollars in funding from Verily, the life sciences effort launched by Google's parent, Alphabet, and French drug giant Sanofi aims to address one of the biggest problems in health care — diabetes. And it aims to do so through “the marriage of technology and medicine.”
Onduo, based in Kendall Square, will be headed by Joshua Riff, a Tufts Medical School graduate and former emergency room doctor. In an interview, Riff cited his experience as chief medical director at Target (NYSE: TGT) — from February 2013 until September 2014 — where he says he applied principles taken from retail to the chain stores’ pharmacies and medical clinics. He hopes to take a similar approach with diabetes using software and clinical data.
Riff, who recently moved to Newton, said that Onduo is not focused on any particular product or technology. Rather, the startup aims to do two things for the more than 400 million people living with type 1 and type 2 diabetes worldwide: “One, can we give them tools to remove the friction in their lives.... Number two, can we give them better insight.”
The “friction,” he explained, includes those things (ranging from daily injections to frequent visits to the doctor) that are required of patients to manage the disease. The “insight,” he said, will be particularly focused on predictive analytics, for example, identifying certain times or days of the week that a particular patient is more likely to have higher or lower blood glucose levels.
It’s the latest in a slew of grand initiatives announced over the past nine months since Alphabet, the parent company of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), announced the name, Verily, for its life science division. Verily has several hundred employees at its headquarters in South San Francisco, with announced projects ranging from Baseline (a study of what makes up a “healthy” human) to surgical robots (via a partnership with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)). It’s also working on smart contact lenses that can monitor blood glucose levels through a partnership with Novartis, but Riff said that Onduo won’t be involved in that.
