In keeping with our mission to provide comprehensive advertising analysis, MediaRadar puts together a report of the most important mergers and acquisitions news each week. Stay in the loop, whether you sell advertising space or focus on business development. This week, Gilead takes out FortySeven, Apple acquires start-up Voysis and Infor is purchased by Koch Industries. The American biotechnology company, Gilead has completed an acquisition of Forty Seven, Inc. at a rate of $97.50 per share that equates to a lump sum of $4.9 billion in cash. The deal bolsters Gilead's portfolio of oncology drugs through Forty Seven Inc.'s blood cancer medicine, which is expected to be on the market within 2 years.

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.

"By combining data from across our NASH clinical development program with artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools, we have the opportunity to better characterize this complex disease and understand how potential therapies can impact disease progression," said Mani Subramanian, MD, Senior Vice President, Liver Diseases, Gilead Sciences. "Applying PathAI's deep learning research platform for liver histology assessment will enable a more rigorous review of treatment response and has potential for the exploration of novel biology in patients with advanced fibrosis due to NASH." In a collaboration with PathAI, a leader in AI-powered research in pathology, Gilead is evaluating machine learning approaches to liver histology assessment for use in the diagnosis and staging of NASH and monitoring of treatment response in clinical trials. A study of images from liver biopsies from patients screened for the Phase 3 STELLAR program compared the staging and characterization of liver disease as assessed by experienced pathologists and by the PathAI research platform. The pathologists scored biopsies using the NASH Clinical Research Network (CRN) and Ishak fibrosis classifications, and the PathAI research platform, a convolutional neural network, evaluated these biopsies following training on more than 68,000 annotations from 75 board-certified pathologists.

Gilead's top executives continue to reap the benefits of the blockbuster hepatitis C drugs it acquired several years ago. Those figures represent the actual value of stock vested in 2016, not estimated fair value. Milligan took over as CEO in March 2016, replacing Martin, who now serves as executive chairman. Martin has taken home $523 million since 2014, when Gilead started selling both of its hepatitis C drugs, Sovaldi and Harvoni. A vast majority of Martin's pay has come in the form of cashed-in stock.