A Star Professor--And Her Radical, AI-Powered Plan To Discover New Drugs

Not many scientists get solicited for photo ops, but for Daphne Koller it's a regular occurrence. "It happens at pretty much any event that has tech people," Koller says when asked about one recent snapshot. It's not like I feel like this is something I deserve." Selfie requests are just one sign of Koller's stardom, earned from more than 20 years bridging computer science, biology and education. She chalked up a string of accolades along the way: getting a master's degree from Jerusalem's Hebrew University at 18; becoming a Stanford University professor focused on machine learning at 26; winning, nearly a decade later, a Mac Arthur "genius grant" for research that combined artificial intelligence and genomics; and cofounding $1 billion (valuation) Coursera, an early platform to let people around the world take university classes for free. The next act for this 51-year-old innovator: Insitro, a firm in South San Francisco that aims to find new drugs by sorting through masses of data. If it succeeds, it will have overturned how drugs get discovered. Lab biologists typically focus on a few specific proteins as drug targets. If those fail, data scientists make suggestions for others to try. Insitro, on the other hand, wants to collect much more data before the biologists go off on their hunt. It will leverage advances in bioengineering (such as Crispr gene editing) and in software that enables computers to see things that escape humans. Koller describes her aha moment this way: "Machine learning is now doing amazing things if you give it enough data.