IT Blog

Daphne Koller is best known as the cofounder of Coursera, the open database for online learning that launched in 2012. But before her work on Coursera, she was doing something much different. In 2000, Koller started working on applying machine learning to biomedical datasets to understand gene activity across cancer types. She put that work on hold to nurture Coursera, which took many more years than she initially thought it would. She didn’t return to biology until 2016 when she joined Alphabet’s life science research and development arm Calico.

Two years later, Koller started Insitro, a drug discovery and development company that combines biology with machine learning.  “I’m actually coming back to this space,” she says. 

There’s a lot of hope that artificial intelligence could help speed up the time it takes to make a drug and also increase the rate of success. Several startups have emerged to capitalize on this opportunity….