Mendel.ai announced on July 11th that it raised seed funding of $2 million for an artificial intelligence engine that assists patients and doctors in finding the best treatment and diagnostic methods for medical conditions quickly. The funding was co-led by Bootstrap Labs and DCM Ventures with DeNa Strategic Investments, Launch Capital, and Advisors Fund’s Mark Goldstein participating.
The artificial intelligence Mendel.ai powers Mendel Health, a for-profit corporation using deep learning technology to look through patient records and unstructured data in medical literature to find a treatment-option based in evidence. The company currently focuses on cancer and oncology patients.
The founder of Mendel.ai, Dr. Karim Galil, spoke in a press release about why he founded the company, saying, “Finding the right clinical trials can determine life or death for many cancer patients, but physicians just can’t humanly stay abreast of the thousands of available clinical trials. After realizing the terrible inefficiencies in recruitment procedures for clinical trials, we set out to fix what can potentially save millions of cancer patients.”
The algorithms that run the program can interpret natural language in medical documents and produce inferences without relying on hard-coded rules, finding an appropriate clinical trial in minutes instead of days or weeks. A team of physicians currently train the artificial intelligence, working with cancer genomics companies and hospitals to introduce and improve upon the AI.
