Verily's New General Counsel Says Health Tech Firm 'Poised to Change the World'

"We now have a platform that's making a huge difference in the pandemic that we're living in," Patton said.

July 23, 2020 at 02:22 PM

4 minute read

Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Verily Life Sciences has named Cynthia Patton, a longtime in-house lawyer for biopharmaceutical giant Amgen Inc., as the health care tech startup's next general counsel.

Patton will take the reins of Verily's legal department in San Francisco in late August. She succeeds Claudia Walsh, who now works for Facebook Inc. as director and associate general counsel.

At the moment, Verily is largely focused on providing COVID-19 screening, testing and data analytics through its Project Baseline program, which the firm rolled out in 2017 as part of an effort to collect, store and map health care data. Verily asserts that its massive data collection practices comply with federal and state regulations.