In 2015, a group of technologists and clinical doctors founded Mendelian to better diagnose patients with rare diseases. Worldwide, there are over 6,000 rare diseases that 1 in 17 people will get in their lifetime. They are diseases that most doctors will only see once or twice during their career and so will not be readily able to detect.
Mendelian has developed a methodology for analysing clinical clues across medical healthcare records to speed up diagnosis of rare diseases. The MendelScan algorithm captures disease features from electronic health records across large patient populations. It aggregates data, finds patterns and digitises knowledge, so the results can be searched and found. It speeds up the diagnostic capabilities of clinicians and saves years of fruitless searching for individual patients.
Rudy Benfredj is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mendelian. Rudy joined the Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2021. He says: “I’m looking forward to experimenting with new professional development tools and techniques. In particular, I want to see how coaching can align my personal development with the growth of the company.”
To date, Mendelian has scanned nearly a million patient records in the UK searching for undiagnosed patients. It is now focusing its resources on establishing the technology internationally. Rudy anticipates that by 2024, MendelScan will be commissioned nationwide as the go-to digital health screening tool to diagnose rare diseases among GP patients.