“The ultimate goal is literature-based drug discovery,” Nadler said, referencing the field of scientific literature on data mining for ideas. “The economic value of this as a company is going to eclipse by orders of magnitude what we could have charged hospitals or advertisers.”
Alexander Tarashansky, creator of Claude Science, an anthropic platform that supports research scientists, also joined the company to support its clinical work.
The company needs to overcome competition from cutting-edge artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, which has also entered the space with ChatGPT for healthcare. Anthropic has also launched healthcare tools, although it recently partnered with OpenEvidence to bring the tools to 100 low- and middle-income countries.
“The fact that doctors are adopting and using software of their own volition means there is a degree of differentiation that OpenEvidence can really lean on,” said Nworah Ayogu, partner at investor Thrive Capital.
But analysis of OpenEvidence’s effectiveness has yielded mixed results.
A study by the Mayo Clinic, an investor in the startup, found that it “provided accurate evidence-based recommendations” in the five patient case studies that were sampled, although its impact on treatment decisions was more limited.
Other research, including a paper published in June in Nature, found that it underperformed general-purpose AI models like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT in clinical benchmarks.
Eric Oermann, a neurosurgeon at NYU Langone, said there was a lack of research on the performance of individual AI tools and little guidance on how to implement the tools in a clinical setting.
There is also widespread concern that more young doctors may make mistakes by relying too much on OpenEvidence and other systems without first mastering basic knowledge of particular diseases and their prescribed treatment options.
“It’s a fun, friendly competitive pressure to play with benchmarks…[But]There is no question which AI tool doctors trust and use,” Nadler said.
Additional reporting by George Hammond in San Francisco.
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