BOSTON, Feb. 23, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BERG, a biopharmaceutical company uncovering health solutions through a data-driven, biological research approach, today announced the appointment of Michael A. Kiebish, Ph.D. as Chief Precision Medical Officer. In the newly created role, Kiebish will continue to drive BERG's mission to change the paradigm of patient treatment through data-driven science, merging biology and technology to map disease at the cellular and population level.
Kiebish will work directly with BERG CEO, Niven R. Narain to advance Berg's placement as the world's leading fully integrated precision medicine company that underscores a "patient-centric vision."
"I'm very excited to announce Michael Kiebish's appointment and the creation of this new role," said Niven R. Narain, Co-founder, President, and CEO, BERG. "It spotlights the growing importance precision medicine is playing in the changing face of healthcare, and the end of the 'one-size-fits-all' approach to patient treatment. Kiebish has been a pioneer in this field and his leadership will drive BERG into its next chapter of drug development."
BERG, the namesake of Chairman and Co-founder Carl E. Berg, utilizes artificial intelligence as a foundation to creating the next generation of drugs and diagnostics. Its revolutionary drug, BPM 31510, has been engineered to battle some of the most deadly cancers, including highly metabolic tumors.
"So much innovation in drug discovery is heading towards increasing targeted therapies working in smaller subsets of patients," said Atul Butte, MD, Ph.D., inaugural Director of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and the Principal Investigator of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine. "BERG naming a Chief Precision Medicine Officer shows the importance of this approach to future biotech research and development."
With Kiebish's leadership and expertise, BERG has validated the vision of Interrogative Biology® Platform to understand patients by "phenotype" rather than "genotype" by integrating molecular data directly from a patient with clinical and demographic information to learn predictive patterns. The platform has the potential to provide physicians with actionable data to recommend efficient and safe treatment pathways, insurance companies with health economics analyses to develop more relevant formulary, and governments with a data ecosystem for financial modeling of healthcare needs of the population.
"The promise of precision medicine has received a lot of attention," added Narain. "Matching the patient's biology to define a phenotype and selecting the right treatment for a patient is the future. Mike has overseen a robust platform at BERG for realizing this vision, and turning big data into something actionable for patient."
Kiebish is a recognized world leader in systems medicine and omics profiling. He has been invited both nationally and internationally to speak on precision medicine by some of the world's leading universities and organizations. Additionally, he serves on the editorial advisory board of leading industry journals, and shepherds key government relationships on behalf of BERG such as the U.S. Department of Defense and UK Prime Minister's initiative, 100K Genome Initiative "Genomics England." Kiebish earned his doctorate from Boston College, and received his postdoctoral training in Molecular Pharmacology at the Washington University School of Medicine.
About BERG
Berg, is a biopharmaceutical company with divisions that include Analytics, Pharma, Biosystems and Diagnostics. Our research focus seeks to understand how alterations in metabolism relate to disease onset. We have uncovered key insight into metabolic control factors and namely into underlying elements in the Warburg Hypothesis. The company has a deep pipeline of early-stage technologies in CNS diseases and metabolic diseases that complement its late-stage clinical trial activity in cancer and prevention of chemotoxicity. Armed with the use of the discovery platform that translates biological output into viable therapeutics and a robust biomarker library, Berg is poised to realize its pursuit of a healthier tomorrow. For additional information, please visit www.berghealth.com.
About the BERG Interrogative Biology Platform
BERG's application of machine-learning (Artificial Intelligence) in biology and medicine allows for a combination of systems biology and systems engineering leading to well defined answers on human health. The BERG Interrogative Biology® platform integrates molecular data directly from a patient with clinical and demographic information to learn predictive patterns. The platform has the potential to provide the physician with actionable information to recommend efficient and safe treatment pathways, insurance companies with health economics analyses to develop more relevant formulary and governments with a data ecosystem for financial modeling of healthcare needs of the population.