Google wants to be everywhere, even inside your body.
On Friday, Google and the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson announced a partnership between Google’s life sciences division and Ethicon, a division of Johnson & Johnson that makes surgical products, to develop new robot-assisted surgery technologies.
The deal “will help explore how the latest innovations in computer science and advanced imaging and sensors could be integrated into tools that help surgeons as they operate,” Google said in a statement.
For now, the announcement is mostly just that — an announcement. The companies gave few details about the nature of the partnership or how much money might be involved. Google at least said its contribution would not be in developing surgical instruments, but rather in its particular skill in handling large amounts of data.
In statements, the companies suggested that some of their goals included developing imaging technologies that would give surgeons a clearer real-time look inside the body, or software that could highlight features that are crucial but difficult to see, such as blood vessels, nerves or the margins around a tumor, which can be crucial to a successful cancer surgery.
Google also said its team would try to figure out how to consolidate volumes of medical data and testing into a more useful interface.
“Surgeons typically consult multiple separate screens in the operating room to view preoperative medical images (e.g., M.R.I.s), see results of previous surgeries and lab tests, or understand how to navigate an aberrant anatomical structure,” the company said in its statement. “Smart software could overlay these images on top of the interface where a surgeon is already viewing a robotic-assisted operation.”
Google has ambitions far beyond Internet search, and over the last year, biotechnology has become one of its favorite areas to explore. The company created its life sciences division, which is part of its Google X research unit, with the 2013 hiring of Andrew Conrad, a molecular biologist who is head of the division.
Mr. Conrad’s steadily growing team has announced several projects that sound like science fiction, including a contact lens that can measure glucose levels, a longevity project called the Baseline Study and an attempt to create a pill with particles the size of molecules that would be able to detect diseases like cancer.
In addition to the life sciences division, Google has also joined with Arthur D. Levinson, a former chief executive of Genentech, to create a pharmaceutical company called Calico. Last year, Calico announced that it would build a new Bay Area facility that will research diseases that afflict the elderly, such as neurodegeneration and cancer.
Robot-assisted surgeries have become a rapidly growing area of medicine, but big questions exist about their cost and safety. In particular, the effectiveness of the “da Vinci” surgical robot has been questioned in studies and dubbed “fake innovation” by critics.
Last year, the National Science Foundation teamed with private donors and scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, to establish a research center to help develop a second generation of medical robots that could perform low-level and repetitive surgical tasks.