Bristol-Myers Squibb and GNS Healthcare announce biomarker alliance

Bristol-Myers Squibb is entering into a new collaborative agreement with GNS Healthcare, focusing on the development of new immuno-inflammation biomarkers.

The alliance will utilise GNS' REFS (reverse-engineering and forward-simulation) supercomputer platform to build computer models for disease biology discovery, utilising data from a Bristol-Myers Squibb clinical study.

In doing so, a disease model will be created that can support virtual clinical trials, capable of simulating the effect of inhibiting various drug targets and predicting which methods would be useful for specific groups.

Dr Iya Khalil, executive vice-president and co-founder of GNS Healthcare, said this will be an important development in the advancement of personalised 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," he said.

According to Bristol-Myers Squibb's newest financial report last month, the company saw a 14 percent year-on-year surge in sales in the second quarter of 2011.