At a fork in the road, Aditya Khosla, Ph.D., is taking the path less traveled: one that will take him away from PathAI, the company he helped start half a decade ago.
Khosla, who has also served as chief technology officer of the startup since its 2016 founding, will take on the same role at Iterative Scopes, which was founded one year after PathAI and is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from PathAI’s Boston headquarters.
As CTO, Khosla will take charge of Iterative Scopes’ machine learning, product management and software engineering teams as the MIT spinout awaits FDA clearance of its first artificial intelligence-powered software tool and continues to develop new ones. Alongside the CTO post, Khosla has also joined Iterative Scopes’ board of directors.
The company’s initial offering, dubbed Skout, uses computer vision technology to analyze camera feeds in real-time throughout a colonoscopy. It looks for polyps and other suspicious tissues that could potentially be early signs of colorectal cancer.
“Aditya brings a dedicated expertise in machine learning and improving patient outcomes with AI-powered healthcare technologies,” said Jonathan Ng, M.B.B.S., Iterative Scopes’ founder and CEO. “I am incredibly excited for Aditya to bring his scientific leadership and operational expertise to Iterative Scopes to unlock a new generation of AI tools in gastroenterology.”
Khosla co-founded PathAI in 2016 alongside Andrew Beck, M.D., Ph.D., fresh off earning his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. In a recent post on LinkedIn, he noted that he’ll continue to support PathAI as an advisor.
“While I continue to believe in our mission and trajectory more than ever before, the company is getting to a stage where it can grow and prosper without me,” he wrote. “I loved the early stages of PathAI going from zero to one, and I hope to take the lessons I have learned (from the many many mistakes I’ve made!! Sorry!) and apply them to an earlier stage company.”
He continued, “This has been a very personal decision, and my belief in the continued success of PathAI under Andy’s leadership remains unquestionably strong!”
As for his new role, Khosla said in a statement, “I’m excited to join Iterative Scopes as it makes significant inroads toward eliminating the disparities in care for the treatment of GI diseases. Its application of real-time, computer-vision-based technologies for precision medicine has the potential to benefit millions of patients at their point of care.”
His new appointment comes amid a period of major growth for Iterative Scopes. It kicked off the year with a $150 million series B funding that easily dwarfed its previous $30 million haul and included backers like Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Eli Lilly and more.
The startup also recently secured its first regulatory approval: a CE mark for Skout that arrived in November. That same month, it submitted the technology for FDA review.
In addition to the polyp-spotting AI, Iterative Scopes is developing tools to detect signs of other gastrointestinal issues, such as irritable bowel disease. Altogether, it's hoping that the AI programs will both improve diagnoses of the conditions and streamline clinical trial recruitment and drug development efforts to treat the underlying issues.