Summary: New artificial intelligence technology reveals previously unknown cell components. The findings may shed new light on human development and diseases. Most human diseases can be traced to malfunctioning parts of a cell -- a tumor is able to grow because a gene wasn't accurately translated into a particular protein or a metabolic disease arises because mitochondria aren't firing properly, for example. But to understand what parts of a cell can go wrong in a disease, scientists first need to have a complete list of parts. By combining microscopy, biochemistry techniques and artificial intelligence, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators have taken what they think may turn out to be a significant leap forward in the understanding of human cells.

Robert Langer, the co-founder of Moderna and a lauded MIT professor, said, "We are at the tipping point of the modernization of drug discovery" and that the "Quris platform could be a significant value to pharma companies and the health of society at large." Langer is a member of the scientific advisory board of Quris, which officially launched this week and announced $9 million in seed funding to support its efforts. Nobel laureate Aaron Ciechanover is the chairman of the company's scientific advisory board. Quris, based in Israel and Boston, is an artificial intelligence (AI) company operating in the pharmaceutical space. Its team has developed an AI platform to predict which drug candidates will work most safely and effectively in humans.

I.S.K. is on the scientific advisory boards of Pulse Data and Medaware, both companies involved in predictive analytics. S.S. is a founder of, and holds equity in, Bayesian Health. The results of the study discussed in this publication could affect the value of Bayesian Health. This arrangement has been reviewed and approved by Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policies. S.S. is a member of the scientific advisory board for PatientPing.

When crowdsourced labor company CrowdFlower recently raised funding from Microsoft, co-founder Lukas Biewald told me his team was focused on technology that allows businesses to supplement algorithms and artificial intelligence with human judgment from crowdsourced labor pools. Now CrowdFlower bringing on more experts to shape the development of that technology. Specifically it's formed a three-person scientific advisory board, made up of Barney Pell (founder/co-founder of startups including Powerset, LocoMobi and Moon Express, who also led an artificial intelligence team at NASA), Anthony Goldbloom (founder and CEO of Kaggle) and Pete Warden (a staff research engineer at Google, where he's the technical lead on the TensorFlow Mobile machine learning project). "With all these different customers and all these different applications, we wanted them to be confident that they're going to get a high-quality algorithm," said Biewald. He's also a friend of mine from college --although we really only talk about CrowdFlower now, which is kinda sad when you think about it.) "One way to make sure all the product decisions we make really reflect the cutting edge was to get some of the world leaders come in and look at our product."