Page 44 - Forbes - USA (November 2019)

Daphne Koller Cont. weeks instead of years,” Koller says.
N made in heaven” for investors, she says. Within six
40
N HOW TO PLAY IT
According to
O tro $15 million now with $1 billion to follow if it
I Gary Robinson
V A T Quantum com-
O puting and AI are
N massive tailwinds
N Not many scientists get for healthcare
I research and San
solicited for photo ops, but for Daphne Koller it’s a
R Diego’s Illumina
O regular occurrence. “It happens at pretty much any leads the way. Its
F
event that has tech people,” Koller says when asked machines have
N lowered the cost
O about one recent snapshot. “It’s a little awkward. of sequencing a
I whether it can identify five proteins that could be
T It’s not like I feel like this is something I deserve.” human genome
P
I Selfie requests are just one sign of Koller’s star- from $10 million
R in 2007 to $1,000
C dom, earned from more than 20 years bridging and are chang-
S computer science, biology and education. She
E ing how cancer
R chalked up a string of accolades along the way: screening and
P
getting a master’s degree from Jerusalem’s He- research is done.
— “We are moving
Y brew University at 18; becoming a Stanford Uni- from a world
G versity professor focused on machine learning at where decisions
O on which drugs
L 26; winning, nearly a decade later, a Mac Arthur to give a patient
O were primarily
N “genius grant” for research that combined artifi-
H cial intelligence and genomics; cofounding $1 bil- made on edu-
C cated guesses
E lion (valuation) Coursera, an early platform to let to one where
T
people around the world take university classes they are made
on the basis of
for free. data,” says Gary
The next act for this 51-year-old innovator: In- Robinson, a port-
folio manager
sitro, a firm in South San Francisco that aims at $260-billion-
to find new drugs by sorting through masses of in-assets Baillie
data. If it succeeds, it will have overturned how Gifford. A recent
dip in sales
drugs get discovered.
growth caused
Lab biologists typically focus on a few specific Illumina shares to
proteins as drug targets. If those fail, data scientists drop by 25% from
record highs, but
make suggestions for others to try. Insitro, on the Robinson shrugs
other hand, wants to collect much more data be- at the volatility.
fore the biologists go off on their hunt. It will le- “The healthcare
sector is large
verage advances in bioengineering (such as Crispr and inefficient
gene editing) and in software that enables comput- and therefore it is
ripe for change,”
ers to see things that escape humans.
he says, “Illumina
Koller describes her aha moment this way: is the primary
“Machine learning is now doing amazing things beneficiary.”
if you give it enough data. We finally have the op-
portunity to create biological data at scale.”
Insitro’s computational experts and biologists
work together to create lab experiments to pro-
duce massive custom data sets. Machine learning
models then find patterns to suggest new tests
and potential therapies. Robotics like automat-
ed pipetting machines reduce human error. With
all this, Insitro can do “experiments in a matter of
F O R B E S . C O M
AI plus biology, her background, was a “marriage
months Koller raised $100 million from ARCH
Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Foresite Capital,
Alphabet’s venture fund GV and Third Rock, with
Jeff Bezos and others joining later. In April, she
landed a deal with Gilead Sciences that gives Insi-
helps find a treatment for a deadly form of nonal-
coholic fatty liver disease. The disease is expected to
soon become the leading cause of liver transplants.
“There are very few individuals who understand
both sides of the beast,” says Mani Subramanian,
who heads liver disease clinical research at Gilead.
“The biology as well as the deep learning.”
Insitro’s future payouts from Gilead hang on
targets for drugs and then whether targeting those
proteins leads to approved therapies for the liver
disease. The contingent payments, which include
revenue sharing from successful drugs, helped Insi-
tro earn a spot on Forbes’ inaugural AI 50 list of the
most promising artificial intelligence companies.
More than 20 other startups are chasing the
dream of faster, cheaper drug discovery through
AI. Among them are Notable Labs, with $55 mil-
lion of venture capital, and Verge Genomics, with
$36 million. Novartis has announced a five-year
AI collaboration with Microsoft, and Merck and
GSK have startup partnerships as well.
Artificial intelligence does not make biology
easy. “I don’t think the platform can be magic,”
Koller says.
Before Insitro can reap rewards, a few hundred
thousand lab tests need to happen. Koller has the
energy. Bouncing around Insitro’s office—she
gave away her desk chair to one of her 53 employ-
ees because she never used it—she moves from
a room named Macrophage (a white blood cell)
to one named Elastic Net (a data-modeling tech-
nique) to show off the latest lab equipment.
Big Pharma’s interest would seem to make In-
sitro a likely acquisition target if it hits pay dirt.
But Koller says she doesn’t want to see Insitro
“swallowed into the maw” of a larger organiza-
tion. She wants it to make its own branded drugs.
The ultimate goal is that the people asking for HOW TO PLAY IT WRITTEN BY ANTOINE GARA; PATRICK WELSH FOR FORBES
photos ops will be healthier thanks to Insitro.
Koller says she hopes they come up to her and
say, “Because of you, I have my life back.” F
F IN AL T HO UG HT
“DATA TRUMPS EVERYTHING.”
—Josh Estelle, a lead engineer for Google Translate
N O V E M B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 9