Vinod Khosla: In The Next 10 Years, Data Science Will Do More For Medicine Than All Biological Sciences Combined

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, TechCrunch and CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington and Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla took the stage to discuss the areas Khosla is currently most interested in. Besides food tech, the one area that seems to get him the most excited is clearly medicine. In his believe, “in the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.”

Now that’s a pretty controversial statement, but Khosla believes that mobile tech and cheap hardware could seriously change the health-care business within just a few years. To do this, though, he argues, entrepreneurs can’t just drop out of Stanford after the first year. It takes a few Ph.D.’s with degrees in robotics, machine vision, machine learning and similar topics to make this a reality.”

The area I’m most excited about is the kind of technology together with sensors and wearables changing the practice of health care,” he noted. To push this trend forward, Khosla has invested in products like Ginger.io, which uses big data analytics and mobile technology to improve healthcare, including psychiatry.

The other company he has invested in is CellScope, which aims to create a small diagnostic toolkit based on iPhone accessories – starting with a digital otoscope. Why, after all, should you have to go and see your doctor when you can safely diagnose an ear infection with your iPhone camera and CellScope, Khosla asked.

“Eighty percent of what doctors do, tech can do at a fraction of the cost — especially your rural doctor in India,” he continued. Still, he granted, tech won’t be able to replace the top doctors at research hospitals anytime soon.


Backstage Interview