CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — GNS Healthcare,
Inc., (GNS) the leading healthcare analytics company focused on
enabling personalized medicine to improve human health, today
announced that it has entered into a collaboration with
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (NYSE:
BMY) 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.” 

About REFS

REFS is comprised of integrated machine learning algori

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