March 12, 2007
Gene Network Sciences
Colin Hill
CEO and Co-Founder
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many other companies did not?
While the economy had its ups and downs in the past five years, we were able to buffer ourselves from these market fluctuations by winning a number of high-profile grants and cultivating a strong core of angel investors who understand the huge long-term potential of our technology. These funding sources allowed GNS to invest in our technology until the market steadied and we hit our commercial stride.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
The industry will continue to move to more of an information-driven process, with increasing value being placed on the discovery of drug mechanisms and corresponding markers. This is the only way to increase confidence in drugs getting to market: increasing the power to predict winners by leveraging all of the new data with computational methods. This is part of delivering the right drug to the right patient. While adaptation of fully personalized medicine may be taking longer than once promised, we are seeing some very encouraging movement in this direction.
What products and services does your company provide, and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
GNS delivers rapid inference modeling of drug toxicity and efficacy straight from a drug-specific data set. We provide quantitative and testable predictions of mechanisms of action and knowledge of markers of efficacy and toxicity.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
GNS has partnered with IBM, the leader in scientific supercomputing. Coupling our software with Blue Gene’s power of thousands of linked computer processors allows the discovery of new biology and mechanisms of action at an unprecedented rate. Results that used to take months or even years can now be delivered in days or hours.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
The application of our breakthrough network inference technology will improve clinical trial success rates. GNS delivers ConfidenceMetrics that show mechanisms of drug efficacy and toxicity. GNS ConfidenceMetrics are available no matter which combination of ’omics data and clinical endpoints are used, and are delivered on a timeline to get our customers to market quickly.
Where do you see your company in five years?
In five years, Gene Network Sciences will be the dominant source of drug mechanism information for pharmaceutical and biotech companies looking for improved drug development. A significant number of drugs that will be coming to market will have utilized GNS technology during their development. If it is possible for a company to dominate the extraction of critical “make it or break it” information in the drug development process, as Google dominates the process of online search, GNS will be that company.