GNS Healthcare, a Cambridge, Mass.-based healthcare data analytics company focused on enabling personalized medicine, has entered into a collaboration with global CRO Covance to develop 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 2 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 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.