A former Stanford University researcher who served as chief computing officer at Alphabet anti-aging business Calico Labs has launched a startup of her own. In a Medium blog post, Daphne Koller offered an overview of her new business, insitro. The development is part of a wider, growing trend of companies seeking ways to lower the cost of drug development.
Koller in her blog post said that by applying big data and machine learning to drug discovery it can make the process faster, cheaper and more successful. Here’s a summary of how machine learning will be applied her approach:
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To enable the machine learning, we will use high-quality data that has already been collected, but we will also invest heavily in the creation of our own datasets using high throughput experimental approaches, datasets that are designed explicitly with machine learning in mind from the very start. The ML models that are developed will then help guide subsequent experiments, providing a tight, closed-loop integration of in silico and in vitro methods (an insitro paradigm).
Investors in insitro include ARCH Venture Partners, Foresite Capital, a16z, GV, and Third Rock Ventures.
Many biotech entrepreneurs and data scientists are harnessing machine learning to identify new drug targets or find new applications for existing drugs, as BenchSci notes on its blog. London-based Benevolent.AI, founded by Ken Mulvany in 2013 after he sold his biotech business Proximagen, is one example. Its AI-enabled drug development arm is BenevolentBio. This week the company appointed named a new CEO — Joanna Shields, who had previously served as UK Minister for Internet Security & Safety.
BERG is a Boston-based company that applies machine learning analytics to patient biology. It is collaborating with AstraZeneca to identify biological targets and treatments against neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.
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This isn’t the first business Koller has launched. She previously cofounded web-based university course provider Coursera in 2012 with Andrew Ng and served as the Co-CEO until 2014.
Photo: Getty Images
