A San Jose startup that's using artificial intelligence to pore through rapidly mounting research on COVID-19 said it uncovered a surprise this week that prompted it to fast forward the unveiling of its work on Thursday.
Mendel Health Inc., which does business as Mendel.ai, found papers from 2006 and 2020 that showed that Diltiazem, a drug used for hypertension, could be effective in halting replication of the virus.
"We contacted Pfizer Inc., which makes the drug, to see if they were aware of this and they said they weren't," Dr. Karim Galil, CEO of Mendel told the Business Journal.
While any application of this connection is likely going to take time to be proven effective, Galil said what his company's AI engine found convinced him to open it up to others immediately.
Mendel.ai until last month was focused on matching up patients with cancer research, using both a massive collection of data it assembled and access to patient data.
In 10 days it has entered into its A platform some 50,000 scholarly articles about coronaviruses and COVID-19 that the White House made immediately available.
"When we started this 10 days ago, it was about 30,000 papers and in days it will be many thousands more," Galil said. "Researchers, epidemiologists and clinicians can use our 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."
Mendel doesn't have access to COVID-19 patient data yet, so it had to create simulations to help its AI learn what might be relevant in the data.
"We have 15 health organizations that provide us with cancer patient data in oncology, but we haven't received access yet to coronavirus patient data," Galil said. "We hope that will come soon. But meanwhile our COVID-19 AI search engine can be very helpful."
He said his company's search engine is more useful than those available from Google and others because it was designed from the ground up for medical applications.
Its COVID-19 project is co-sponsored by two of its investors, venture capital firm DCM and AI-focused VC firm Bootstrap Labs.
"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," he said. "This uniquely positions us to leverage our learnings and technology to aid in the global fight against COVID-19."
Mendel employs about 50 people at its San Jose headquarters and in an office in Egypt. It has raised only about $6 million in funding since it was founded three years ago.
But Galil thinks it is now ready to make a big impact on the fight against COVID-19.
"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 data of COVID-19 patients," he said.