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Daphne Koller

Former Co-Founder, Coursera

Search every verified Daphne Koller interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of insitro, spoke in September 2026 at the Pearl@90 Symposium at UCLA, where she discussed her company's work on causal AI for human health. She described building a "causal engine" that uses techniques such as do-calculus to identify therapeutic targets, noting that over 75% of diseases lack an FDA-approved treatment. She also credited Judea Pearl's work on causality as influential on her career and insitro's current research. In a September 2026 interview on The Next Endeavour, Koller discussed the limitations of AI in drug discovery, stating that biology, not molecule design, remains the primary bottleneck. She said that while AI can design molecules, the key challenge is determining the correct biological intervention point. She also mentioned that insitro's first program is heading toward the clinic and described the company's "causal data factory" in South San Francisco, which involves intervening in cells to generate causal data. In an August 2026 podcast, she stated that only 22% of diseases have any FDA-approved drug and that the fundamental problem in drug discovery is identifying the target to intervene in to revert disease.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“What we've tried to build, what we're working towards building, is a causal engine for human health that makes predictions about do calculus in a human. And that gives the opportunity to unlock a massive set of therapeutic interventions for the 75 plus percent of diseases for which there is currently absolutely no treatment. There's over 75% of diseases for which there is no FDA approved therapeutic, zero. And we are”

“The difference between success and failure in this industry is an understanding of causality. And the problem is that that is a rare commodity in this industry. And there's just not enough of those targets to be had, which has led to a very unfortunate phenomenon from this industry, which is that everybody goes after the very small number of targets where we have true evidence of causality, which means that 70-plus p”

“It's an incredible number. It's a depressing number and also one that to your point I think people were maybe less risk off than they are right now. Risk off means it's a term of art. It's an investor term of art especially in the biotech industry where it refers to people being unwilling to take biological risks. So 10 years ago I think there was maybe more openness to exploring novel targets and as the statistics o”

“I think that there is a lot of enthusiasm and excitement about the role that AI can play in the physical world and specifically the role that AI can play in human health and I think that is a not unreasonable thing and we all would love for AI to do something that helps make the world better as opposed to you know all the predictions of doom and gloom and I think there is and that has caused a lot of predictions that”

“I think Alzheimer's is probably closer to zero than to 80. There are hypotheses, but I don't think those hypotheses have as of yet been sufficiently validated that we believe them to be true. And there is an increasing number of people who believe that the traditional hypothesis might not really explain what's going on.”

“I don't think that the GLP-1 model is one that can be replicated for some of the diseases that are not on the mass market diseases where people are incentivized to pay out of pocket cuz they want to look great when they go to the beach, right? I think that there are many diseases where, you know, the economics are such that frankly most people cannot afford to pay for the drug out of pocket, nor should they have to.”

Other executives at Coursera

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