Introducing the unmet needs index

Today we're publishing our index of unmet needs in human disease: 2443 indications scored and ranked on burden of disease, prevalence, pipeline activity, and burden of treatment. Access the index on our insights page here.

There are thousands of named human diseases, many of which are rare and obscure. Within each disease, there are yet more subsegments of distinct biology that require their own distinct treatments. With so many patients in need of better drugs, it's hard for a drug developer to know which particular problems to focus on.

Because the problem space is so immense, drug developers often focus on solving unmet needs that are visible to them. If you read the history of some of our most impactful therapeutics, it is surprising how often the genesis of an idea can be traced back to a personal story, a patient anecdote, or a passionate clinician who happened to match an unmet need to a potential medicine.

At Convoke, we think that one of the more promising use cases for language models, and artificial intelligence generally, is to scan the entire corpus of human knowledge with the goal of surfacing overlooked information. One of our goals is to help operationalize biomedical knowledge, and so we've put together this index of unmet needs in human disease. Our hope is that the right person might uncover a worthy problem they otherwise wouldn't know about, and that regular updates can keep a record of progress against disease over time.