Prof Chamindie Punyadeera
Prof Chamindie Punyadeera is an inventor and a leader in women in Science Technology Engineering Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM).
She has had a hybrid research career working in industry as well as in academia. She has worked at Philips Electronics in the Netherlands and has been instrumental in developing Philips Mini-care I-20 for cardiac disease detection. She has also contributed to the development of an integrated platform to detect nucleic acids (Idylla TM) commercialised by Biocartis NV (Belgium).
She is a globally acknowledged pioneer in salivary diagnostics. She leads a world-class saliva and liquid biopsy research laboratory in Australia, > 14 researchers focusing on developing novel salivary technologies to detect heart disease and the application of liquid biopsy to accelerate precision treatment in cancers.
Prof Punyadeera has 125 publications, 7 invited book chapters, cited >5300 times with a h-index of 40. She has also produced 16 PCT applications. Her team is also developing prognostic assays to identify patients likely to develop recurrences using circulating tumour cells. Her team has discovered the world-first occult HPV driven throat cancer in an asymptomatic person, laying the scientific foundation to initiate a screening program.
More recently, her research led to a USA based company obtaining FDA approval for saliva test for oral and throat cancer. Her intellectual property on salivary protein panel to detect heart failure early is licensed to ESN Cleer. She is the convenor of the inaugural saliva conference in Australasia in 2016, which is now a national conference. She has delivered keynote and invited lecturers both nationally and internationally.
She is a grant reviewer for both national and international funding agencies and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Oral Oncology, associate editor BMC Genomics and a guest editor to BMC Medical Genomics, Diagnostics and Biomolecules. She is a consultant to Oasis Diagnostics®, USA and FLUIDS iQ™, Montreal, Canada.