Akhila Kosaraju is the CEO and President of Phare Bio, a social venture pioneering the use of generative AI and deep learning to discover new classes of antibiotics, in collaboration with the Collins Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Under her leadership, Phare Bio launched with funding and support from TED’s Audacious Project, received $27 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), was selected for Google.org’s Generative AI Accelerator, and has been recognized by Fast Company, Newsweek and Wired Health.
Akhila has spent her career building companies and driving innovation at the intersection of infectious disease and computational biology. She was the founding CEO of Variant Bio, a venture-backed genomics and therapeutics company, and previously served as an executive at SIGA Technologies, where she helped bring antiviral drugs against emerging threats to market.
Earlier in her career, Akhila was a White House appointee at the Pentagon, where she served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. She is a recipient of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-founder of the Alliance to End Biological Threats, and a Lecturer at Stanford’s Centre for Biosecurity and Pandemic Resilience. She earned her M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and her B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University.