An Israeli community platform that uses artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing to help patients discover what medical treatments work best and for whom has raised $9 million in seed funding.
The Tel Aviv-based StuffThatWorks empowers patients with chronic medical conditions to share their experiences and broaden the base of "data" they use to determine what course of treatment to pursue. The more contributors the smarter and more personalized the insights get. The data formed becomes available to everyone and is updated in real-time, along the process.
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StuffThatWorks' approach applies to common conditions such as diabetes and ADHD, but also rare and even orphan diseases that receive little attention and for which little information is available. There are already 110 "condition communities" open.
Once 100 users start contributing to a certain community, it will become possible to share and browse initial insights about the condition including age of onset, symptoms, aggravating factors, and treatments.
When the number of users of a community reaches several hundred, StuffThatWorks' proprietary machine learning kicks in, and treatments can be ranked by level of effectiveness.
With thousands of people contributing, the system will be able to predict the most effective treatments for both subgroups and individuals.
The more people participate and contribute to the data quality and the community, the more points they accrue, and the greater their influence on what will be researched next.
"People are the ones that hold in-depth knowledge about themselves, their condition, and the way treatments affect them," explains CEO and co-founder of StuffThatWorks Yael Elish, former Head of Product for Waze.
"Collecting this knowledge in an organized and structured way across is the only way to compare effectiveness in scale. And when that's done across all chronic conditions it creates a gold mine of data that can dramatically advance and facilitate research to the benefit of both the patient and the medical community," Elish says.
Arnon Dinur, a partner at 83North, one of the seed investors, said that "Few companies manage to implement crowdsourcing in a way that significantly impacts the world – and applying it to such an important domain, in an elegant way that scales across so many conditions, has never been done."
StuffThatWorks was founded by Elish, CTO Ron Held, and Chief Data Scientist Yossi Synett.
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