Like you, our team at Mendel has experienced shock these last few months as COVID-19 proliferates across the globe. We are experiencing change with unprecedented uncertainty, the virtual shutdown of key industries and an immense over-loading of our health care systems.
At Mendel, we’ve been using AI to drive clinical research for the past three years, and in that time, we’ve built a machine that understands medicine. This uniquely positions us to leverage our learnings and technology to aid in the global fight against COVID-19.
We’re now excited to announce our new COVID-19 AI search engine which is available to the public. Mendel ingested and absorbed more than 50,000 scholarly articles, released by the White House, related to Coronaviruses and COVID-19. Researchers, epidemiologists, and clinicians can use this tool to ask questions about COVID-19 and glean relevant answers in seconds—a process that can take a human numerous hours, days, or even weeks to conduct.
A researcher beta testing the Mendel COVID-19 search engine found evidence that Diltiazem, a drug used for hypertension, has been proven effective in halting the virus replication. Although the evidence dates back to 2006, this isn’t widely known among the scientific community today.
Unfortunately, the human brain reads slowly, and our memory is prone to miss information, especially with large volumes of data.Even existing technologies, such as Information Retrieval (IR) and out-of-the-box Natural Language Processing toolkits, fail to understand the complex clinical knowledge trapped in the literature. Furthermore, search engines today can’t understand things like a “cough” is a symptom and “Remdesivir” is an antiviral drug.
That’s simply not the case with Mendel. We’ve built an engine that can be asked highly specific questions, such as, “What are the modes of transmission of a virus?” as well as understand that “no intrauterine infections have been recorded” is a relevant answer.
We have assembled a task force of more than 50 AI scientists, physicians, and clinical experts to train Mendel’s clinical artificial intelligence. The goal is to glean and corroborate findings faster and with greater accuracy by absorbing the knowledge in medical literature and cross-referencing it with the electronic medical records (EMR) data of COVID-19 patients.
This approach should help predict the course of SARS- CoV-2 as well as to conduct “In Silico Trials” to evaluate the outcome of different drugs and treatment approaches. Mendel can build a computer simulation of every patient’s journey and make it available for research.
We’re deploying Mendel’s technology at many prominent healthcare providers across the United States, including academic and community clinics. Please reach out if you can help expand its impact by partnering with more healthcare centers or pharma companies on the front line of this battle.
This initiative is co-sponsored by our two major investors, DCM, an established venture capital firm with a global presence, and Bootstrap Labs, a venture capital firm focused exclusively on Applied AI.
We are always in the business of saving lives.
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