CE mark has been granted to a new app developed by Irish software company Oncoassist. The app (pictured left) shares its name with the firm, and is designed to help oncologists search for academic papers and complex formulas, and provide them with clinical decision support tools that can be used at the point of care. The app is only the third one in the world to receive CE marking as a medical device.

Oncoassist founders Richard Bambury, M.D., Eoin O’Carroll and Kevin Bambury, all graduates of University College Cork, recently were selected out of hundreds of applicants to participate in the Healthbox Europe start-up accelerator, located in the Hub Westminster of central London in the United Kingdom.

Richard Bambury, a medical oncologist working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, N.Y., identified a need for a point-of-care application designed specifically for oncologists and teamed up with his brother Kevin and O’Carroll to develop the application. Kevin Bambury and O’Carroll worked on the project as part of their master’s degree requirements. Their expertise is in electronic business, while Richard Bambury’s is in the medical field.

“I saw a pressing need for a high-technology mobile application that offered me all the tools I needed as I did my rounds,” Bambury told Silicon Republic. “For example, in order to assess how much benefit patients are likely to receive from chemotherapy, we have traditionally used estimates based on prior clinical trial data that may or may not be applicable to each patient. There are a limited number of online tools available to make more precise estimates, but none of these are in smartphone format.”

Bambury added that he and his team pursued the CE mark as it was of “utmost importance” considering the app was to be used in medical applications.

Currently released for the iPhone and iPad, the team plans to role out the platform for use on Android devices within the next six to 12 months.

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