Serial entrepreneur Daphne Koller's latest startup, Insitro, aims to rethink the drug discovery process. It is by far the highest-capitalized healthcare startup on this year's ForbesAI50 list by jillianiles
, which also includes PathAI, Deep6, Viz.ai and K Health. The latter makes a smartphone app for health advice targeted at consumers, while the others sell products to health systems or drug companies. Insitro falls somewhere in the middle: Its ultimate goal is to make and sell its own branded pharmaceuticals, but it recently announced a partnership with drugmaker Gilead Sciences to help it find a treatment for a deadly form of liver disease known as nonalcoholic steatohepatis, or NASH.
Working across paradigms is nothing new to Koller. She was the first machine-learning professor at Stanford, where she spent 18 years working on projects related to computer vision, statistical modeling and computational biology before cofoundingCoursera and doing a stint at Alphabet-owned longevity company Calico. She’s become what she describes as bilingual: Able to speak the language of biotechnology as fluently as the language of machine learning.
In recruiting for Insitro, she’s making sure her new staff is, too. The team doesn’t have silos for life scientists or computational experts. Instead, workers with different backgrounds jointly define problems, design experiments, build models and interpret data. As a playful tribute to this cohesion, Insitro’s named each of the spaces in its office after a machine learning term or a type of cell. You can walk from “Random Forest” to “Macrophage” or pop into “Elastic Net.
“The groups that we’re talking about have different ways of thinking, different jargon and different approaches to doing science,” Koller says. “Getting them to work together as an integrated team is really our secret sauce.” Even though Insitro is far from the only company trying to rejigger drug discovery—technology-infused drug development startups
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