GNS HEALTHCARE EXPANDS SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM ADDING HANS WINKLER, PH.D., AS CHIEF SCIENTIFIC OFFICER
New CSO to help company develop enhanced analytics offerings further enabling data-driven development of precision medicines
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., October 11, 2012 – GNS Healthcare, Inc. (GNS), the leading Big Data analytics company focused on enabling personalized medicine to improve human health, today announced the expansion of its senior management team, adding Hans Winkler, Ph.D., as Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Winkler will promote the development of the Company's intellectual property, building out product infrastructure and fostering the overall scientific strategy for the Company's product offerings to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as well as academia. He was most recently Senior Director and Global Oncology Biomarker Program Leader within Janssen Oncology Research and Development, a division of Johnson & Johnson.
"We are too familiar with the current paradigm in the pharmaceutical industry, which has not resulted in gains to productivity, efficacy rates or probability of success, despite an unprecedented ability to generate data," said Colin Hill, President, CEO and co-founder of GNS Healthcare. "Hans is an innovator and a longtime customer of GNS with over 13 years of experience in the discovery and development of new medicines. At GNS, he will help us bring about a new paradigm for pharmaceutical development, providing innovative medicines to the right patient subpopulations. Dr. Winkler will guide the development of computer models of human disease and therapeutic interventions. These models will match patients to treatments that work and will foster the discovery of better medicines faster, resulting in lower costs and improved patient outcomes."
"The quality of the GNS team and its state-of-the-art REFS™ technology platform set GNS apart as a creator of valuable knowledge at machine scale—generated from disparate data sources with various data types and categories," said Dr. Winkler. "To succeed in the future, the pharmaceutical industry will adopt these Big Data analytics approaches to turn data into knowledge and discover what medicines work, and for whom. This will reduce the time and cost necessary to get innovative new medicines to those patients for whom they actually lead to meaningful clinical benefit."
Dr. Winkler joined Johnson & Johnson in 2003 as the Director and Head of Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics. From 1998 to 2003, he was Director and Global Program Manager for Target Validation Technologies at AstraZeneca, where he was responsible for target validation technology assessment gaining experience in array based gene expression analysis. Before this, he was a scientist and instructor at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, where he worked in endothelial cell biology and immunobiology. Dr. Winkler earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Vienna and completed postdoctoral work at the Institute for Molecular Pathology. Prior to his doctoral work, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to pursue graduate studies, obtaining his M.S. in molecular biology from the University of Houston.
About GNS Healthcare
GNS Healthcare is a 'Big Data' analytics company that has developed a scalable approach for the discovery of what works in healthcare, and for whom. GNS analytics solutions are being applied across the healthcare industry: from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, health plans and hospitals, to integrated delivery systems, Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). GNS Healthcare discovers the knowledge needed to match patients with treatments that work. www.gnshealthcare.com