A year ago, Gideon Mantel announced that he was leaving Commtouch Software Ltd. (Nasdaq: CTCH; TASE: CTCH). Mantel founded the security software company 20 years ago, and served as its CEO for 13 stormy years. After so many years in the job, his departure was no surprise; however no one knows where Mantel is headed.
For the last four years, Mantel has been working behind the scenes on a project that combines the information he has collected in the field of information processing with a world that is new to him - healthcare. Mantel founded his new company, First Life Research, three years ago.
"I looked for an area that the Internet has not yet revolutionized," said Mantel in an exclusive interview with "Globes". "In almost every aspect of life - shopping, tourism, finance, music - you can see the difference between now and how it was before the Internet. Only in the field of healthcare do we still go to the doctor, get a prescription, and go to the pharmacy. Granted we can glean information from the Internet, but it is arriving from more or less the same source as it was ten years ago."
Mantel noticed one change that the Internet brought about - consumer discussions about health. "People put on the Internet a lot of personal information. As a person who deals with information security, I immediately realized what we can produce from this," he said.
At the time, Mantel did not yet know what he would do with the medical information, but he knew that he was interested in a project where the medical information could benefit the consumer, and not only the pharmaceutical and insurance companies.
After the Remedia affair, they finally understood.
At the same time, an event occurred that put all the puzzle pieces in place. "The Remedia affair was discovered after a doctor worked a 34-hour shift, during which two babies were suffering from the same inexplicable problem. She uploaded the query to a doctors' web site, at which point she saw that other doctors had seen the same phenomenon that same month."
It is possible that if the information had been added regularly to social and medical forums, and analyzed using tools intended to locate trends, the issue possibly could have been discovered weeks before by two concerned parents of babies who were acting strangely.
Mantel started just such a project - a sophisticated tool that can analyze all of the information users upload about their health situation, thereby improving the search for medical information on the Internet, and enabling surfers to learn from the experiences of other users.
Mantel founded First Life, which operates a website called, "Treato" (Treat Online) that was launched last week. "My hope is that in another five years, when a patient leaves a doctor's office with a prescription, he will go to the site, "To treat it", Mantel said.
First Life has raised $5.5 million to date. The largest investor is Reed Elsevier Ventures, which invests mainly in media, information and technology companies, and has a market cap of $9.5 billion.
The site will serve the pharmaceutical companies as well
Currently, the site is oriented mainly to find information that is connected to taking medications, but does not focus on comparing doctors or medical procedures. In the future, First Life hopes the site will be able to gather information about food supplements and the affect of foods on various diseases. This missing information is even more important today than information about medicines.
The search is conducted in the same way one does a regular Internet search. The consumer types in the name on the site of the medicine he is interested in. The system analyzes more than a billion posts about medical issues (10 billion posts about medical issues have been posted so far on the Internet), and displays a filtered list on the topic requested and their connection to the specific medicine.
A search for popular pain relief drug Tylenol found 280,112 posts connected with the medicine, and lists popular issues such as addiction, ear infections, and numbness that are connected with Tylenol.
The list contains dozens of these types of issues, and is an indication of what interests other users. If a consumer wants to research a different topic, he can refine his search or type in sub-topics. Also, it's possible to compare different medications through a separate query.
The consumer still needs to read the posts and to choose which information he is interested in, but First Life does a large portion of the work.
"A Google search will access a lot of information from interested parties. We are analyzing surfers' opinions," says Mantel. "Also, our search brings up topics that the consumer would not have known to look for, and enables him to do an extremely thorough search on topics that he wanted to learn about from the start."
The search engine works by semantics. For example, a search about Ritalin and addiction can include posts in which the word "Ritalin" appears together with "the need for larger and larger amounts" but without the word "addiction".
In this way, it is possible to locate side effects such as those in the Remedia case, but also to hear about other users' experiences who compared generic medications with branded ones, or the effects of a specific drug that was used for something other than its original use (for example, birth control pills being used to treat acne), as well as common side effects from changing medications.
What is the product's business model?
Mantel: "We will enable more sophisticated searches for a fee, and we will be able to generate reports for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, marketing agencies, researchers, and academics, etc. But alongside the advanced searches, there will always be a free site, at least in the website's current format. Don't forget that the site depends on information from Internet users."
What would pharmaceutical companies search for on "Treato"?
Currently, pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money on clinical trials to determine whether a drug causes side effects, but many times these side effects are discovered only after the drug has been launched.
Over the last few years, some countries have even begun regulating tools for the collection of information about side effects, which mainly rely on doctors' reports. Treato overrides the need to install reporting mechanisms for doctors and requiring them to report side effects that they have discovered, since this information would be gathered directly from the patients.
You are liable to confront the pharmaceutical companies with information that they do not necessarily want to know.
Mantel: "We believe that pharmaceutical companies would want to identify side effects earlier in order to prevent economic damage, as well as damage to their reputation, which could cost them huge amounts of money.
"We will offer to make advanced searches for companies and to generate special reports so that they can identify side effects before the medications reach the FDA and consumers. Maybe they could give a warning, for example, that a certain medication is not suitable for someone with heart problems, and in this way prevent the product from being taken off the market."
Mantel's investor is looking for Israeli technologies
Anthony Askew, a partner at Reed Elsevier Ventures, First Life's largest investor, said that despite the fact that the fund operates out of London, it invests mainly in US companies and in one Israeli company: Babylon Ltd. (TASE:BBYL). "We are looking for additional Israeli investments," Askew said. "We invest in information management, Internet and bioinformatics companies. These fields are very strong in Israel, and I come to Israel more often than I visit most European countries for a reason. You have abilities that many countries are jealous of.
"What is still missing here is an ample supply of large, quality Internet companies. We believe that this situation is going to change, and we hope to be part of the process."
Reed Elsevier Ventures also invests in Healthline, one of the largest healthcare websites. This is how cooperation between First Life and Healthline was created, which is backed by a grant form the BIRD Foundation for Israeli-US cooperation.
"The healthcare field has always had filters blocking the transfer of information to the consumer," Askew said. "First Life's goal, which we connect well with, is to encourage transparency, and to give the consumer control over the information."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 26, 2011
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