Leading Computer Scientist Joins InSilico Medicine's War on Aging and Cancer
Baltimore, Maryland (PRWEB) May 28, 2014 -- Today Insilico Medicine, Inc., a Deep Knowledge Ventures' portfolio company based in Baltimore, that is using advances in genomics to discover new therapies to target aging and age-related diseases, announced that leading computer scientist Professor Bud Mishra has joined its Science Advisory Board. A recent investment, Insilico Medicine, Inc. holds an exclusive license to drug discoveries made using another DVK portfolio company, Pathway Pharmaceuticals,’ OncoFINDER tool, which predicts drug efficacy through a proprietary gene expression analysis algorithm. The addition of leading computer scientist Prof. Mishra's expertise to that of S.A.B. Chairman Dr Charles Cantor, former Director of the Human Genome Project, places InSilico Medicine in the vanguard of bioinformatics and commercial life extension initiatives. Indeed, on the front line of the war on aging and cancer alongside companies such as Craig Venter's Human Longevity Inc and Google's Calico.
Professor Bhubaneswar (Bud) Mishra is a Professor of computer science and mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Professor of human genetics at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and a Professor of cell biology at NYU School of Medicine. He founded the NYU/Courant Bioinformatics Group, a multi-disciplinary group working on research at the interface of computer science, applied mathematics and biology. His primary research subfield is “applied algorithmics,” but has ranged more generally from compilers, algorithms and complexity, logic and algebra to robotics, finance, the internet, and biology.
“Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov is a fascinating young scientist, seriously engaged in modeling the future of aging and various diseases that accompany it. He has assembled a dream team, especially with leading visionary Dr. Charles Cantor, who has 'disrupted' the way we think about biology, biotechnology and bioinformatics, becoming Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board. With a group like this, I hope to engage in a collective ‘head-banging’ against the amazingly challenging biomedical problems we face, using some of the most advanced science and technologies in development,” said Professor Bud Mishra.
Prof. Mishra’s research career over the last thirty-four years has consistently focused upon information-technology-based approaches to real-life problems of enormous societal impact: namely, cyber security solutions, cancer characterization through genomic data analysis, fast and cheap technology for DNA sequencing with applications to genetics, computational systems biology tools with applications to drug discovery, robot hand design with industrial applications, hierarchical hardware model checking and symbolic computation with applications to robot kinematics. More importantly, many of these research programs have also been instrumental in creation of new fields (often outside traditional computer science), where computing now occupies a central position.
As an example, around 1983, Mishra and Clarke proposed an innovative approach to computer hardware verification via model checking and applied it to a well-known asynchronous FIFO queue element circuit, designed by Caltech’s Chuck Seitz, to discover that this circuit had a serious race condition. Over the subsequent twenty-five years, this paper has motivated and influenced an entire community to extend the basic concepts, improve the algorithmic efficiency and broaden the range of applications; for example in identification of molecular pathways in cancer.
In the mean time, Prof. Mishra has continued to develop these ideas and apply them to robotics, control theory and more recently to systems biology through algorithmic algebraic model checking. Around 1997, Prof. Mishra began to collaborate with biologists and chemists to develop the first single molecule genomic technology to map and sequence genomes rapidly, inexpensively and with small amount materials. The success of this technology depended on Mishra’s innovations in probabilistic analysis, Bayesian statistics and efficient algorithmic techniques. The technology is being commercialized by various biotech companies; it promises to have an enormous impact on our understanding of infectious, genetic and genomic diseases like cancer and neuro-degeneration. Mishra has also recently advanced this technology to improve its resolution using AFM-based nano-technology. As in hardware verification in the past, this new field of single-molecule genomics has now begun to attract a thriving multi-disciplinary community.
He has industrial experience in Computer Science (Tartan Laboratories, and ATTAP), Finance (Instadat ,Tudor Investment and PRF, LLC), Robotics and Biotechnology (MRTechnology, OpGen, and Bioarrays). He has been editor of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, AMRX (Applied Mathematics Research Exchange), Transactions on Systems Biology, and Nanotechnology: Science and Applications, and author of a textbook on algorithmic algebra and more than two hundred archived publications. He also holds adjunct professorship at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. From 2001-04, he was a professor at the Watson School of Biological Sciences, Cold Spring Harbor Lab. He is a co-inventor of Optical Mapping, Array Mapping, and Copy-Number Variation Mapping in biotechnologies. His other technological inventions extend to model checkers for circuit verification, robot grasping and fixturing algorithms, reactive robotics, real-time schedulers, and nanotechnology for DNA profiling.
“Prof. Bud Mishra is one of those rare scientists, who excelled in the many fields including physics, engineering, computer science, robotics, finance, genomics, epigenetics, genetics and disease modeling. In the course of his career, Dr. Mishra has been mentored by many scientific and engineering luminaries and has trained two generations of computer science visionaries now leading various cutting edge research at DEShaw, Blackstone, Google, and many other leading companies. We are fascinated by Dr. Mishra’s work in cancer genetics and application of mathematical modeling to the many processes related to human aging,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of InSilico Medicine, Inc.
“It is a pleasure to be involved in this innovative enterprise that can potentially really optimize individual medical care. I look forward to working with some of the outstanding participants in this endeavor. In particular I have long hoped for an opportunity to do something direct with Bud Mishra and now that he has also joined the SAB of Insilico Medicine we have a forum to promote brain storming and interactions," said Dr. Charles Cantor, a Professor at Boston University, the former director of the Human Genome Project with the Department of Energy and the Chair of the Science Advisory Board of InSilico Medicine, Inc.
About Insilico Medicine, Inc
Since 2008 the research team behind InSilico Medicine has worked hard to develop the most comprehensive scalable drug knowledge management system of annotated drugs, small molecules, biologics and all other factors that may influence the many events on the molecular, cellular and tissue levels. The company uses their expertise in targeted drug selection based on individual patient’s gene expression data and signaling cloud regulation for drug discovery in oncology and aging. The longer term goal of InSilico Medicine is to partner with the top pharmaceutical companies to help analyze their drug databases and lead compounds, improve enrollment into clinical trials, and to enable them to accurately predict the efficacy of their drugs on patient groups and individual patients. For more information, please visit http://www.insilicomedicine.com
Charles Groome, Media Relations, Deep Knowledge Ventures, http://deepknowledgeventures.com/, +44 2032891994, [email protected]
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