Doctors Meet Data Science: An Interview with Karim Galil of Mendel Health

Mendel Health
Mendel Health

Photo: The Mendel Health team with Karim in the center.

Do you ever feel your medical records are an unorganized mess, making it impossible for doctors with their busy schedules to match you with the latest treatments that are most optimally matched to your needs? In comes Mendel Health, a way for your data to be “in the driver’s seat”. Thousands of treatments for cancer and other diseases are in trials, and few doctors know about them… which is something Mendel Health is working to solve. So people do not lose their chances of beating disease. We asked the company’s CEO, Karim Galil, a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you become interested in public health?

I went to med school and got to practice medicine for a couple of years. I was very frustrated with how the practice of medicine was immune to the rate of advancement in technology.

What problem are you working to solve with Mendel Health?

We are trying to stop needless deaths in medicine. Every day thousands of patients pass away. It’s all too common that after their death we learn about a clinical trial that would have saved them. This is due to the huge increase in the rate of research, and the inability for any human to stay up to date. To make the promise of precision medicine real we have to find ways for doctors to keep up with all this research and data.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

Our success metric: Number of  patients matched to a new trials or research which was never mentioned to them before AND it saves their life!

How do you think success can change your industry?

It will close the gap between research and the practice of medicine. This means faster drug development cycles and patients generating a wealth of data. All that will accelerate biomarker discoveries and curing terminal illnesses like cancer.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

What is unique about our team is the multidisciplinary skills. You have a physician leading a team of doctors and a technical PhD leading a team of data scientists.

The intersection between medicine and data has sparked solutions to many problem other AI companies have been facing in healthcare.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

Move fast. The faster you fail, the faster you will succeed.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

The biggest challenge has been getting the data team to understand medicine and getting the medical team to understand AI.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

Our goal is matching 10,000 cancer patients to effective treatment options, which was not considered possible before using Mendel.ai.

Learn more about Mendel Health by watching Karim pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!