GNS Healthcare, Inc., (GNS) the leading healthcare analytics company focused on enabling personalized medicine to improve human health, announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Bristol Myers-Squibb Company focused on the discovery of novel disease biology and biomarkers in the area of immuno-inflammation. Utilizing its supercomputer-driven REFS (Reverse-Engineering and Forward-Simulation) platform, GNS will use clinical and molecular information from a Bristol-Myers Squibb clinical trial to build computer models in a hypothesis-free, unbiased manner that will be simulated to identify key molecular mechanisms. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Using patient data comprised of genetic information, gene expression levels, specific blood markers and clinical outcomes researchers will use REFS to construct a comprehensive inflammation disease model directly from the raw data. The resulting disease model is intended to support virtual clinical trials that will simulate the clinical effect of inhibiting various drug targets and help predict novel molecular targets to combat immuno-inflammation that would be effective for specific types of patients.

“We are pleased to be working with Bristol-Myers Squibb to identify biomarkers in immuno-inflammation,” said Dr Iya Khalil, executive vice president and co-founder of GNS Healthcare. “This is the first step in building a significantly advanced in silico research paradigm that may enable development of new therapies based directly on human data, and address the needs of patients with particular genetics and molecular phenotypes, ultimately enabling the optimization of individualized patient outcomes.”

REFS is comprised of integrated machine learning algorithms and software that extract “causal” relationships from complex, multi-dimensional data and enable the simulation of billions of “what if?” hypotheses to explore novel unseen conditions and predictions forward in time. REFS is licensed to GNS Healthcare from parent company Via Science.