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Written by Staff Writer
COLOMBO (News 1st) – Manuri Gunawardena, Founder and the CEO of the revolutionary “HealthMatch” was a medical student who was frustrated witnessing patients who had exhausted themselves in search of life-saving clinical trials. But her “HealthMatch” app became the ultimate breakthrough. With “Healthmatch” she aimed to “connect sick patients with clinical trials of potential cutting edge treatments.”
Manuri Gunawardena came up with the brilliant idea to develop “HealthMatch” while she was working on a case at the lab. She clearly knew that coming up with suitable clinical trials depending on the patient took hours and even days, making navigating registries inefficient and unproductive. She believed there had to be a better way, a “user-friendly” practice to make it more practical. One day she came across two patients, with the same lung cancer with equally motivated family members. One patient’s father was a general practitioner and he clearly knew what he was doing; he got his daughter onto two clinical trials and her condition was stabilized. But the other, although equally motivated to stable condition did not have resources or the network and ultimately led to her demise. This motivated Manuri to invent a procedure that will enable all the patients to access all treatment options available; leading to the development of the “HealthMatch”
She noted that the “HealthMatch” world’s best cancer and medical treatments are at the clinical trial stage and although they have more treatments options 80% of the trials fail to recruit patients. Additionally, with the rapid development in research, it renders nearly impossible to keep track of the clinical trials. She added that it was uncomfortable and inconvenient to navigate through piles of clinical trial options as time is of the essence when it comes to a cancer condition. As an example, she noted that a lung cancer patient might find over 500 clinical trials at government registries (ANZCTR or australianclinicaltrials.gov.au) which also needs to fulfil numerous eligibility criteria to be addressed. She noted that all these time consuming conventional practices can be avoided easily with “HealthMatch” with a few keystrokes.
“HealthMatch” is using technology to break barriers and solve a very human problem” she concluded.
Today, “HealthMatch” has raised $1.3mn in capital from Australian and U.S. industry leaders and won the inaugural Australian version of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield.
Meanwhile, Manuri Gunawardena, the CEO and the founder of revolutionary “HealthMatch”, Forbes 30 under 30 Class of 2019, the Featured Honouree in Healthcare and Sciences, is only twenty-six and has few more years at med school !!!
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