Mother of a tech entrepreneur developing artificial intelligence for families with rare diseases

Farid Vij, CEO and co-founder of Citizen Health, and Nasha Fitter, chief business officer and co-founder of Citizen Health.

Citizen Health

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When Nasha Fitter’s youngest daughter was diagnosed with FOXG1 syndrome, a rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorder, in 2017, she faced a challenge that many in the rare disease community unfortunately know all too well: There is little to no public information about the disease or how to manage it.

“There really wasn’t anything done,” Fitter said. “Just getting everyday answers to my questions and the problems I was facing was really unsystematic and random… it was basically a matter of going on Facebook and hoping someone would answer my question.”

At the time, Fitter was told that there was no treatment for the syndrome, that no research was underway and that there was no real plan for what might be next for her daughter. To address this problem head-on, she co-founded the FOXG1 Research Foundation to work toward a cure.

But Fitter, a technology entrepreneur, also saw an opportunity to advance care for patients with rare diseases, which could also speed the search for cures.

Together with tech entrepreneur Farid Vij, the two founded Citizen Health in 2023 with the goal of building what Vij calls an “AI advocate” for the rare disease community.

“The biggest thing that can benefit you as a patient with a rare disease is having an advocate in your area,” said Vij.

Due to the lack of information and resources available about certain rare diseases, this burden often falls to a parent or loved one.

“Thousands of families have a reason not to take no for an answer, so they will try to find the nearest doctor, they will start a foundation or they will try to become scientists themselves and set up gene therapy programs,” he said. “But most people can’t afford it or they don’t know how to do it, and it’s really hard to democratize it.”

The impact of AI on the healthcare industry

AI and LLMs are rapidly transforming the healthcare industry, and more and more people are turning to these tools when it comes to their health, whether to better understand their health status and test results, questions to ask their doctor, or how to get treatment.

Vij said this development is great for people seeking information about common diseases and general healthcare. But for many patients with rare diseases, “no research has been done, there are no approved therapies, and even the top expert has only seen a few patients, so there is nothing for the model to draw from,” he said. Ultimately, this is what drives many rare disease patients and their families to turn to Facebook and other groups where they aren’t even sure the information they’re getting is relevant.

This is a problem that Citizen Health is trying to solve by building one of the largest rare patient data networks of its kind. The AI-powered platform works with patients and rare disease advocacy groups to build communities across different diseases. It uses medical records, genetic information and other patient-reported experiences to create a data set that can be interrogated by those same patients, their families or doctors to find answers. Citizen Health also collects and organizes data from consenting patients and provides access to researchers so they can advance drug development and treatments without placing additional burdens on rare disease communities.

To date, there are more than 8,000 rare disease patients and more than 350 medical conditions on the platform, according to Citizen Health. Additionally, more than 16 pharmaceutical companies are using this data to advance treatments.

Citizen Health is free for patients to use and they can choose to have their data shared with researchers – according to Vij, 98.3% of patients currently choose to share. If a researcher wants to access this data for commercial purposes, they pay Citizen Health, which also shares a percentage of it with the patient.

“We have been able to reduce the time to market by 30-50% for these therapies where they are actually based on patient needs,” Vij said. “This is our dual mission: to use this aggregated data to help patients in their everyday lives, and on the other hand to use the same data to advance research so that we can bring therapies to market more quickly.”

The company has raised $44 million since its founding in 2023, including a $30 million Series A funding round in August 2025 led by 8VC. Other supporters include Headline, Transformation Capital and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Nasha Ritter, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder of Citizen Health, and her daughter Amaya, who was diagnosed with FOXG1 syndrome, an extremely rare neurodevelopmental disorder.

Citizen Health

Using agent AI to help patients with rare diseases

Now Citizen Health is taking its platform one step further by introducing agent-based AI designed specifically for patients with rare diseases. It helps them schedule appointments, navigate insurance appeals, notify them when something in their medical records needs attention, and connect them with similar patients and relevant clinical trials.

“With a rare disease, a parent spends an average of 53 hours per week caring for the children, beyond the normal parenting that anyone else would have to provide,” Vij said. “So it gives a lot of those hours back, but also leads to much better outcomes for patients because you learn from the collective wisdom of the community.”

Fitter, who is not only the company’s executive director but also uses it to help care for her daughter, said these types of tools and access can be crucial for rare disease patients and their families who are struggling to find the right care or roadmap.

“It is critically important for individual patients to receive better care and make better decisions every day,” she said. “For our foundation, if we didn’t have Citizen, we wouldn’t be seeing our first patient this year.”

Fitter said in her foundation’s case, Citizen Health’s data helped guide the endpoint of its treatments from seizures to movement disorders, a decision that was made after the medical data of other patients with FOXG1 syndrome could be analyzed. The foundation recently had its Type D meeting with the FDA and was allowed to use patients’ natural history data as a placebo control arm, allowing it to skip a Phase 3 trial and a placebo, saving about $80 million, according to Fitter.

“The biggest achievement is that the next patient who is being diagnosed will have an easier life because of the work we have been able to do,” she said.

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