Why We Started Eureka

You never forget the moment you’re told a loved one has an incurable illness.

Four years ago, my mom was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease. I launched myself into doing whatever I could to help: finding specialists, researching treatments, tracking her progression, and learning what works for her symptoms. These were things I thought doctors do — but beyond writing prescriptions, her doctors did frustratingly little to actually address her issues.

This story is familiar to almost everyone with a chronic disease. Doctors tend to stop at “there is no cure” and leave it up to the patient (and their family) to figure out what can help reduce their symptoms. Patients are expected to sit tight and wait for the ivory tower to find treatments.

I turned to online patient communities — disease-specific forums, subreddits, and Facebook groups. Together, people in these communities are finding better ways to manage their symptoms and make progress towards actually solving their disease. Many patients in these communities actually understand treatments better than the average doctor — after all, they have the experience of living with the disease and are more motivated to find a solution — and as such, patients are flipping the script, taking control of their own care, and guiding their doctor to order tests and get new treatments.

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Eureka exists to supercharge the process.

We give patients the ability to find what treatments to try, and then to figure out how much each treatment is helping their symptoms. It’s an app that lets you run an experiment on yourself: create a hypothesis, collect the right data, and analyze the results to give you confidence about whether a treatment works for you or not.

Building the best tool for personal experimentation is just the start. In the process, we’re building a community of hopeful, passionate, engaged patients who are helping themselves and advancing the state of the art. And together, we’re building the biggest knowledge base in the world for human health outcomes: what works on who.

Thanks for checking us out. I hope you’ll join us in helping patients with chronic diseases finally get control over their symptoms.