“One of the main challenges with diagnosing rare diseases is that health systems are simply not designed to detect them,” Noam Alon tells ISRAEL21c.

Alon is the CEO and cofounder of Impilo, an Israeli startup that has developed an AI-driven diagnostic system for faster and more accurate identification of rare and complex diseases. 

According to a report from 2023, at least 350 million people have an undiagnosed or rare medical condition. Each country has its own criteria for what constitutes a rare condition, depending on the population size. 

One-of-a-kind platform

Impilo’s novel platform utilizes natural language processing, machine learning and data analysis to identify conditions that are often misdiagnosed or undiagnosed, causing distress to patients and exacerbating the burden on health systems. 

Its primary goal is to reduce errors and unnecessary costly diagnostic tests, procedures, hospitalizations and redundant treatments. 

“Our uniqueness is that we work with medical texts, not just data; we are developing a tool that can specifically extract the signs of these rare diseases from medical history,” explains Alon. 

“It’s very difficult to extract these symptoms only from data, because they’re not always coded properly. Often, they appear like symptoms of other diseases.”

Impilo’s software analyzes the medical files of the health system where it is installed without extracting the files from the parent system, avoiding breaches of privacy. This is one aspect that makes Impilo stand out from emerging competitors across the world, according to Alon. 

When the software identifies symptoms that correspond to rare diseases, it raises a red flag. 

“Then we have the ability to explain to doctors why we think this specific patient might have been misdiagnosed,” Alon adds. 

Difficult to diagnose rare diseases

Alon explains why it’s so hard to diagnose rare diseases.

“Let’s take, for example, pulmonary fibrosis or Fabry disease. The percentage of those suffering from these diseases around the world is quite high, but in each individual country there are very few cases.” 

Therefore, health systems don’t have enough patient data on which to build diagnosis models for those diseases.

“The average doctor sees one such patient in their entire career,” he says, adding that these medical conditions often cause symptoms that appear years apart and don’t seem connected.

“Let’s say this patient had one epileptic seizure in his entire life at the age of 12 or 13, and years later he had an inflammation of another body part. A doctor wouldn’t connect the two because it’s two different body systems affected at different time periods,” he says. 

“But when you put these two symptoms together, it’s characteristic of a disease such as tuberous sclerosis,” a rare genetic disease that causes non-cancerous tumors to grow in the brain and other body parts.

Personal story

There’s a personal story of rare illness that motivated Alon cofound Impilo.

He spent most of his professional career at the Military Intelligence Directorate’s research department.

In 2017, Alon’s then-15-year-old daughter became ill with a disease that no doctor was able to diagnose. Following months of medical visits and hospitalizations, a private doctor finally provided a diagnosis that eased her suffering. 

“I asked the doctor how he diagnosed her so fast; he said he had recently diagnosed a teenage boy with the same disease, which took him six months because he had never come across [the illness] before,” recalls Alon. 

A year later, he retired from the military and began developing the idea for a platform that could diagnose rare medical conditions more efficiently. 

The 50-year-old tapped his fellow ex-military intelligence colleague Tzachi Davidi, Impilo’s CTO, and entrepreneur Eitan Yanuv, who heads the startup’s business development, to cofound a venture that would officially become Impilo in 2021. The word impilo means “health” in Zulu.

“We wanted to make money, of course, but if that was our sole goal, we would’ve gone into the field of cyber,” he notes. “We wanted to do good for the world.” 

UK market first

The three founders are the only full-time workers at Impilo. Two physicians act as advisers for the company. Impilo gets its system-training data from Clalit Health Services, Israel’s largest national HMO. 

Besides a modest grant from the Israel Innovation Authority (IAA), the company has been fully self-funded until recently, when a funding round was launched to raise the substantial amount needed to develop the platform beyond the prototype stage. 

“We need to hire data professionals; at this stage we can’t do it alone because we need more data for machine learning to improve algorithms, and data for the doctors to analyze,” says Alon.

Earlier this year, Impilo became one of nine Israeli startups selected by the Dangoor Health-Tech Academy to help its partners in the UK tackle challenges related to healthcare. The Academy was initiated by the UK-Israel Tech Hub at the British Embassy in Israel in partnership with The Dangoor Foundation.

“We want to enter the British market, and then move on to the United States, Canada, Europe and others. The goal is that our platform will serve every health system in the world,” says Alon.

“The aspiration is that there would be no people who are chronically undiagnosed, of which there are many today. If we reduce that percentage to zero, that would be the best.” 

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