GNS Healthcare Collaborates With A Leading CRO To Enable More Efficient And Cost-Effective Drug Development

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- GNS Healthcare, Inc. (GNS), the leading healthcare data analytics company focused on enabling personalized medicine to improve human health, today announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Covance, one of the world's largest and most comprehensive contract research organizations. The collaboration is focused on developing novel data-driven models that will assist pharmaceutical companies in optimizing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of drug development activities. Combining GNS's supercomputer-driven REFS™ (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) big data analytics platform and Covance's data assets derived from its extensive clinical and scientific support of pharmaceutical drug development, the companies will create computer models that predict the likelihood of development success for a drug candidate given available safety and efficacy data across a variety of patient characteristics, across many diseases, starting with Type II Diabetes. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

"Our collaboration with Covance combines our unique collective resources and capabilities to tackle what has previously been an intractable challenge—improving dismal clinical drug development success rates," said Colin Hill, President, CEO and co-founder of GNS Healthcare. "The predictive computer models arising from our collaboration will address this problem and will in turn lead to better treatment options for patients. The collaboration with Covance is a key part of our expanding portfolio of relationships with customers and partners employing the REFS™ platform to learn what drugs work for whom in healthcare."

This collaboration complements GNS' existing work with several major pharmaceutical companies in creating treatment algorithms to match patients to drugs and to discover novel biomarkers from wide-ranging molecular and clinical trial data.

About REFS™
REFS™ (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) is GNS Healthcare's scalable, supercomputer-enabled framework for discovering new knowledge directly from data. REFS™ automates the discovery and extraction of causal network models from observational data and uses high-throughput simulations to generate new knowledge.

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

CONTACT:
GNS Healthcare Inc.
Thomas A. Neyarapally, 617-494-0492
SVP, Corporate Development

SOURCE GNS Healthcare, Inc.