LA JOLLA, Calif., May 14, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Human Longevity Inc. (HLI), a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company focused on extending the healthy, high performance human life span, today announced that three senior leaders have joined the company to help build the transformational healthcare company’s business and technology platforms. Bradley Perkins, MD, MBA joins HLI as Chief Medical Officer, Yaron Turpaz, PhD, MBA, as Chief Information Officer, and Felix Frueh, PhD, is the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. All three will report directly to J. Craig Venter, PhD, HLI’s Co-founder and CEO.
“The breadth and depth of their decades of clinical, regulatory, genomic/personalized medicine and informatics experience make Brad, Felix and Yaron the ideal team to help lead the next phases of business growth at Human Longevity,” said Dr. Venter. “I look forward to working with these three accomplished individuals as we continue our quest to revolutionize healthcare, to change health outcomes and to extend the healthy human lifespan through our novel science and technology,” he concluded.
Brad Perkins, MD, MBA
Throughout Dr. Perkins’ 25 year career he has been a visionary reformer bringing about positive change through his creative, strategic and bold leadership. As CMO at HLI, Dr. Perkins will be responsible for leading all clinical and therapeutic operations at the company, which includes collecting and utilizing phenotypic data, development of the consumer clinics business, and stem cell therapeutics.
Prior to joining HLI, Dr. Perkins was Executive Vice President for Strategy and Innovation, and Chief Transformation Officer at Vanguard Health Systems, a large multi-state, for-profit, integrated health services provider with nearly 46,000 employees. He helped transform Vanguard from a traditional fee for service healthcare model, to a fee for value, “population health” model. Some of his innovative solutions there included: establishing Accountable Care Organizations to improve primary care, implementing an award winning tele-radiology program, and starting a $167 million venture capital fund to support Vanguard’s transformation programs. During his tenure, Vanguard’s revenues grew from approximately $2.6 billion to nearly $6.5 billion and the company had an initial public offering. Vanguard was sold to another publicly traded health care company in 2013.
Dr. Perkins began his career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1989 after completing his residency training and chief residency in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. At the CDC he led some of the most important and high profile programs and published more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.
He first joined and then led the Meningitis and Special Pathogens Branch where he investigated global bacterial disease epidemics. He co-discovered the bacteria which causes Cat Scratch Diseases and conducted translational research leading to development of several new bacterial meningitis and pneumonia vaccines, now the standard of vaccine therapy globally. In 2001 Dr. Perkins led the field and laboratory investigations into the anthrax attacks in the United States. This was the largest and highest profile investigation ever conducted by CDC. In 2005 he was appointed CDC’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, a position in which he managed a $11.2 billion budget, and 15,000 employees with offices in more than 50 countries. Working closely with the CDC Director, he built a $2 billion state-of-the-art emergency response capability and positioned the improvement of population health as a focus of the healthcare reform movement within the White House administration at that time.
Dr. Perkins received his BA in Microbiology and his MD from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and an MBA from Emory University. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine.
Yaron Turpaz, PhD, MBA
Turpaz is an innovative and collaborative leader in biotech and pharma R&D IT. His strategic yet creative process has enabled unmatched innovation in computational and informatics platforms leading to improved and efficient drug discovery and development. In his role as CIO at HLI, Turpaz will be responsible for building and growing the company’s genomic and phenotypic database business, and will lead all bioinformatics/informatics and software engineering efforts at HLI. Turpaz will be expanding the informatics program at HLI’s California facility, as well as building a computing and informatics program and facility in Singapore.
Turpaz comes to HLI from AstraZeneca. Most recently he was the Vice President, R&D IT responsible for the global IT organization services, analytics and infrastructure supporting drug discovery and development. In this position he led a global team of approximately 300 and was accountable for the more than $120 million R&D IT budget. In 2011 he started at the company as the Vice President of Informatics and Information Sciences. He led a global team who were responsible for developing Big Data analytics, knowledge engineering and scientific informatics solutions across the company’s drug discovery & development pipeline for a variety of therapeutic areas including oncology, diabetes, cardiovascular, neuroscience and infectious diseases.
Before his job at AstraZeneca, Turpaz worked in Eli Lilly’s Singapore Centre for Drug Discovery as Director of Integrative Computational Sciences. He headed the bioinformatics, data analysis and software development department whose efforts were geared toward enhancing drug discovery and biomarker identification for oncology and metabolic diseases. Turpaz and his group developed and utilized novel computational approaches by integrating genomic, proteomic and other quantitative biological data to improve drug development and enhance clinical trials. While there, he established the Asian Cancer Research Group (ACRG) in collaboration with Merck and Pfizer. The ACRG is a not-for-profit organization conducting genomic and proteomic analysis on cancers prevalent in Asian populations.
Prior to joining Lilly, Turpaz was Senior Manager, Bioinformatics and Algorithms Development at Affymetrix, Inc. There he managed a team of bioinformaticians, statisticians and software engineers who developed informatics solutions for a variety of microarray applications. He and his team were contributing to the development and launch of six successful commercial microarray products there.
Turpaz has BS in Biology from Tel Aviv University, a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. He also held an adjunct assistant professorship at the Centre for Quantitative Medicine of Duke-National University of Singapore, Graduate Medical School in Singapore.
Felix Frueh, PhD
Frueh is a recognized thought leader in the genomic/personalized medicine space bringing nearly two decades of R&D, management and regulatory/policy experience in industry and government. As CSO, Frueh will lead all genomic operations including non-clinical microbiome testing, high throughput, next generation genomic sequencing, and research collaborations and partnerships including the program with the University of California, San Diego/Moores Cancer Center. Frueh will also be instrumental in guiding HLI’s collaborations and partnerships with the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry.
Frueh was most recently an executive partner at Opus Three, LLC, a consulting group focused on providing strategic advice in regulatory, reimbursement, technology assessment, collaboration and partnership procurement and investments for the diagnostics, pharmaceutical, venture capital and private equity industries. Prior to this, Frueh was President of Medco Health Solutions, Inc. where he led a 100 person health economics and outcomes research-oriented team and managed global R&D functions, including multi-million dollar collaboration deals with pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies. Frueh began at Medco as Vice President, R&D, Personalized Medicine, where he built and led a multidisciplinary research team using state of the art genomic analysis to evaluate novel biomarkers to assess health and patient outcomes. His team’s research and analysis led to changes in clinical practice and FDA labeling of pharmaceutical products.
Frueh was also the Associate Director for Genomics at the Federal Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) during the expansion of the personalized genomics revolution. He established and directed the core genomics review function at FDA/CDER. He had oversight for genetic and genomic data reviews, initiated and established new policies related to genomic data including a new data submission process. Frueh also initiated and led a number of Critical Path projects related to safety and quality control of diagnostic tests and microarrays.
Frueh received his MS in Biology and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Basel in Basel Switzerland. After post-doctoral positions at University of Basel and Stanford University, Frueh was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Medicine at Georgetown University.
Perkins, Turpaz, and Frueh join a team of business and science/technology leaders already in place at HLI. This team includes: Fernanda Gandara, MBA, head of business development, formerly with SGI-DNA; Brian Berning, MBA, head of finance, formerly with LPL Financial; Jill Westman Mullen, chief of staff, formerly with Merrill Lynch; Nicholas Schork, PhD, head of integrated genomics, formerly at The Scripps Research Institute; William Biggs, PhD, head of genomic sequencing, formerly at the Broad Institute; Karen Nelson, PhD, head of the microbiome area and currently President, the J. Craig Venter Institute; David Anderson, MBA, head of talent and culture, formerly with Philips; and Steven French, technology development, formerly with Epic Sciences.
About Human Longevity Inc.
HLI, a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, CA was founded in 2013 by pioneers in the fields of genomics and stem cell therapy. Using advances in genomic sequencing, the human microbiome, proteomics, informatics, computing, and cell therapy technologies, HLI is building the world’s most comprehensive database of human genotypes and phenotypes as a basis for a variety of commercialization opportunities to help solve aging related disease and human biological decline. HLI will be licensing access to its database, and developing new diagnostics and therapeutics as part of their product offerings. For more information please visit, www.humanlongevity.com
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SOURCE Human Longevity Inc.
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