NextBio.com Learn about the latest scientific discoveries & research
Title
NextBio
Description
NextBio was founded in 2004 with funding from private and institutional investors in Silicon Valley. We have assembled a talented team from the worlds of biology and information technology. Our team has extensive technical and scientific expertise in high throughput “-omics” technologies, such as gene/protein expression profiling, genotyping and clinical pharmacology. Our team also has many years of experience building successful companies that have produced gold standard products for life sciences and knowledge management.
Mr. Akhtari has more than 20 years of experience developing and commercializing software products for the analysis, visualization, and management of biological data. As President and CEO of Silicon Genetics, Mr. Akhtari led the team that developed GeneSpring and Varia, the most popular and widely used software packages for visualization and analysis of genomics and genotyping data. These products are used by thousands of researchers in more than 600 leading pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and major research organizations around the world. Silicon Genetics has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America with inclusion on the Deloitte Technology FAST 500 and several other industry rankings. Silicon Genetics was acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2004. Mr. Akhtari has held executive management positions at several other life sciences software companies whose gold-standard bioinformatics products include WinNonlin, GeneWorld, MacVector, and PCGene.
Mr. Kupershmidt has had extensive experience in the design, implementation, and integration of bioinformatics solutions for organizations involved in basic research, clinical and drug discovery efforts. An especially relevant area of Mr. Kupershmidt’s expertise derives from his years at Silicon Genetics. There he helped develop and market software widely used for data mining and management of information from high-throughput genomic and proteomic platforms. Mr. Kupershmidt joined Silicon Genetics at the company’s inception, and has since worked with hundreds of academic institutions and commercial enterprises on the design, customization, and deployment of systems for global analysis and management of high-throughput biological information. In his role as Director of Professional Services, he worked closely with such institutions as Novartis, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer, Stanford, Harvard, MIT and others, on implementing effective bioinformatics solutions. Previously, Mr. Kupershmidt carried out research at Geof Rosenfeld’s lab at UCSD Howard Hughes Medical Institute. There he studied transcriptional mechanisms of gene expression regulation during pituitary development. Mr. Kupershmidt is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Royal Institute of Stockholm (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.
