TorchRecruit backed by University of Melbourne's pre-seed investment

TorchRecruit, a new general practice-based application designed to accelerate recruitment for clinical trials, is the first start-up to receive pre-seed investment from the University of Melbourne, as part of the University's new research translation initiative. The University recently announced the establishment of two new major investment funds, in partnership with Breakthrough Victoria and Tanarra Capital, designed to help founders successfully scale research and innovative ideas from within the University community through start-up companies.

TorchRecruit uses innovative technology to automatically identify trial eligible patients in general practices across Australia - saving time and money and helping patients to gain earlier exposure to new medications and devices.

General practice, the contact point for provision of medical care to 85% of Australians annually, offers the opportunity for optimised patient recruitment that is not reliant on motivated patients, doctors, social media or small pools of patients at hospital clinical trial sites. The result is increased patient diversity and increased applicability.

General practices can decide which trials they participate in and they remain in control of patient data. Only aggregate data, such as the number of patients that may be eligible for a trial, is collected by the University of Melbourne and is managed and stored by the University of Melbourne in accordance with Federal Privacy Law.

Benefits of trials for patients can include improved health outcomes and early access to new treatments. Incentives are associated with general practice participation; this varies based on the trials.

Interested general practices are invited to contact the TorchRecruit team via email: torch-recruit@unimelb.edu.au

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