Insight
Koller: AI requires synthesizing deep learning with causal and interpretable modeling
“What I think we're starting to see right now is a the pendulum starting to swing back in the sense that there is a greater understanding that you really need a bit of both. You need that hugely powerful pattern recognition that we get from deep learning, but y…”
Insight
Koller: AI requires synthesizing deep learning with causal and interpretable models
“What I think we're starting to see right now is a the pendulum starting to swing back in the sense that there is a greater understanding that you really need a bit of both. You need that hugely powerful pattern recognition that we get from deep learning, but y…”
Insight
Koller: Tech workers entering biotech often disrespect biological challenges and create friction
“There's a lot of tech people who come in To life sciences, and it's like, we have that cell verbal. We are the smartest. We're machine learning. We're going to solve everything. And they don't respect the challenges of the other discipline. They sometimes don'…”
Insight
Koller: Most drug failures stem from wrong target selection, not trial design
“It's a place where most programs fail is because we're just not modulating the right thing. It's the wrong target in the wrong indication or the wrong patient population.”
Disclosure
Koller: Insitro aims to replace untranslatable animal models using human cellular models
“Which ultimately what we're looking to do is to replace the sort of untranslatable animal models with something that is much more driven from human biology.”
Insight
Koller: Broad patient targeting to maximize revenue causes drug trial failures
“That is one of the big things that causes drugs to fail is that you are trying to apply it more broadly. If I'm being cynical, sometimes it's supposed to maximize the revenues that you can get from a drug versus trying to figure out exactly in which patients i…”
Insight
Koller: Computational methods cannot compress slow biological disease progression timelines
“And so ultimately there's only so much that you can speed up biology in certain cases because biology takes as long as it takes.”
Insight
Koller: Engineers look for patterns; scientists look for outliers
“When you show an engineer or computer scientist a bunch of dots
Usually the natural inclination is to try and find the pattern, the thing that explains as many of the points as you can, because that is the thing around which you will engineer your system.
If y…”
Insight
Koller: Longitudinal Human Aging Data Is Bottlenecked by Decades-Long Timelines
“Data in aging and specifically human aging is really hard to get because human aging is a very long process. And in order to get data on the longitudinal trajectory of human aging today, one needed to start collecting data, you know, 2030 years ago, and the co…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Koller: ML in biopharma is like general computing, transformative everywhere
“My analogy is that it's not like x-ray crystallography. It's like computers. You're going to use it everywhere, and it's going to be transformative everywhere.”
Disclosure
Koller: Insitro prioritizes single-cell diseases before complex organoid models
“There's plenty of things that we can do today where the where the disease does manifest sufficiently in a single cell lineage, and so we go after those first, and we defer some of the other ones to a later stage, because technologies such as organoids, for exa…”
Assertion Supported
Koller: Drugs with biomarkers are twice as likely to succeed clinically
“There's you know, there's research that shows that drugs that have a biomarker are about twice as likely to be successful in the clinic as ones that do not.”
Assertion Supported
Koller: Drugs backed by human genetics are twice as likely to succeed
“There's also data that show that drugs that have support in human genetics are twice as likely to succeed as ones that do not”
Insight
Koller: Research-grade biomarkers frequently fail in standard clinical care settings
“You can have the most beautiful, sophisticated biomarker that works in a very carefully designed research environment, and it's not going to work in the wild as part of the standard of care.”
Disclosure
Koller: Insitro uses agile for platform biology, but not drug discovery projects
“We have product managers who do scrums and do you know, these agile planning processes, and we apply that also to our platform development, even on the biology side. But at the same time, you know, drug discovery projects, which are years long, you don't do sc…”
Assertion Supported
Koller: 95% of all drug discovery programs fail
“If you look at the actual numbers of what makes drug discovery so expensive, it is the fact that 95% of drug programs fail. They just do not succeed.”
Insight
Koller: Drug discovery lacks clinical outcome ML training data until trials
“Because when you think about it, it's the one area where you really don't have the right type of training data, at least not obviously, because the question you're asking yourself is, if I make this therapeutic intervention in this patient, what is it going to…”
Prediction Held up
Koller: Early Alzheimer's drug approvals will increase available brain MRI data
“I think there will be even more now with the approval of some of the earliest Alzheimer's drugs, because it's going to be part of the process by which people are either selected to receive the drug or not, depending on whether their brain MRI shows certain cer…”
Disclosure
Koller: Insitro expands into metabolism and oncology due to standard-of-care data
“The other areas that we've gone into are metabolism and oncology, because again, those are areas where relevant, disease relevant data, That is high content, that is unbiased and truly informative about the disease state is collected quite abundantly as part o…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Koller: In three years new technologies may unlock more disease models
“Maybe in three years we'll have another tranche of diseases that are unlocked by the technological tidal wave that we're all riding.”
Insight
Koller: Partnering on existing drug assets can shave two to five years
“And that can usually say shave off, you know, two, three, maybe even five years from the development of a program because you've already made the drug. Sometimes you've already put it in people. You've shown that it's safe. You have a good biomarker for when i…”
Daphne Koller