Brandi Davis-Dusenbery is Promoted to CEO; Will Focus on Product Innovation and Global Growth

Seven Bridges Appoints and Promotes Executives to Further Accelerate Commercial Operations

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 15, 2017 – Seven Bridges, the biomedical data analysis company, today announced an expansion of its executive leadership team, including the appointment of Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D., to the position of CEO. Formerly Seven Bridges’ Senior Vice President of Science & Product, Brandi succeeds co-founder Deniz Kural, Ph.D., who is today assuming the role of Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. The company also announced the addition of two executives and the promotion of three others.

“Brandi is the perfect person to lead Seven Bridges through our next phase of innovation and growth,” said Deniz Kural, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Seven Bridges. “She has both the deep science background and operational experience to drive our mission of bringing the Seven Bridges Platform to commercial R&D enterprises and ambitious precision medicine projects around the globe.”

“I came to Seven Bridges in order to help develop new science and technology to improve health care around the world,” said Davis-Dusenbery. “I’m privileged to accelerate this work with our expanded leadership team, which shares a vision for making precision medicine a reality for research organizations worldwide.”

About Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D.

As CEO, Brandi will focus on delivering continued product innovation and driving Seven Bridges’ global growth. In her prior role at the company, she was responsible for leading overall product strategy, managing product teams, and overseeing the company’s scientific projects, which span initiatives involving government, academia, and the private sector. Most notably, she guided the creation of the Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC), an NCI pilot that now supports the analytic needs of about 1,500 researchers investigating petabytes of genomic data collected in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The CGC’s success — for which it earned a 2016 Bio-IT Best of Show award — has prompted additional public and private research enterprises to choose the Seven Bridges Platform for their own large-scale projects. Brandi also has led the productization efforts for Seven Bridges’ Graph Genome Suite, which includes usable and reproducible bioinformatics pipelines for advanced population genomics.

In addition to her work with the Cancer Genomics Cloud and Graph Genome Suite, Brandi has been instrumental in Seven Bridges’ upward momentum, including securing strategic relationships with numerous commercial and government partners. Thanks to her leadership, Seven Bridges now powers projects for the Million Veteran Program, the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC), and, most recently, the Cancer Moonshot’s Blood Profiling Atlas pilot, along with programs at multiple top-10 pharmaceutical companies.

Prior to Seven Bridges, Brandi worked as a Fellow at Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, where she focused on applying next-generation sequencing technologies to understand changes that contribute to motor neuron loss in ALS. Her work has been published in Nature, Cell, Molecular Cell, and other leading journals.

“Brandi’s success with the Cancer Genomics Cloud, Blood Profiling Atlas, and other notable projects is proof positive that she knows what it takes to support analytics at a scale where breakthrough discoveries in precision medicine are more possible than ever before,” said James Sietstra, president of Seven Bridges. “She’s an exceptional choice to lead Seven Bridges at this time of rapid innovation and growth.”

Expanding the executive leadership team

Additionally, Seven Bridges has strengthened its executive leadership team and announces the appointments and promotions of the following individuals:

• Michael Hultner, Ph.D., has joined Seven Bridges as Chief Strategy Officer. In this role, he is responsible for Seven Bridges’ strategic direction, expansion of commercial operations, and strategic partnerships. Michael comes to Seven Bridges from Leidos Health (which merged with Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems and Global Solutions) where he was Chief Scientist for Health & Life Sciences, responsible for research & development, strategy, and business development. Michael brings to Seven Bridges his expertise in health information technologies, enterprise systems development, and large-scale genomics. He has a B.A. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, San Diego and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco.
• Mike Falvey has joined as Chief Financial Officer, responsible for raising capital, leading the company’s financial operations, and implementing financial, operational, and strategic planning efforts. An experienced CFO in both the public and private sectors, he has a successful record leading firms in the life sciences, high technology, and financial services industries, including Analysis Group, Ahura Scientific, Aspect Medical Systems, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Earlier in his career, Mike held management positions at Fidelity Investments, Digital Equipment Corporation, and General Electric. He is a graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was a Seley Scholar, and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
• Andrew Gruen, Ph.D., has been promoted to Chief Communications Officer. He will lead the company’s messaging, marketing, and overall communications. In this role, he will also work to foster strategic commercial and national partnerships. Before joining Seven Bridges, Andrew was Director of Research at the Northwestern University Media Management Center. He also worked for multiple publications, including CNET, the BBC, and Hearst Television. Andrew holds a BSJ in journalism and political science from Northwestern University, and both an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in sociology from King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
• Milan Mitrovic has been promoted to Chief Product Officer. He will oversee the entire Seven Bridges product roadmap. He previously served as Seven Bridges’ Senior Director of Product Development. In that role, he directly oversaw the development of the company’s commercial platform for biomedical data analysis. Milan holds an M.Sc. in industrial engineering, and he was previously General Director of cdnee.org, a nonprofit organization based in Brussels, Belgium.
• Bruce Press has been promoted to Executive Vice President, Business Development and Strategy. He is focusing on building strategic relationships with biotech and pharmaceutical enterprises. He works closely with these organizations to help them streamline analysis of next-generation sequencing data across both clinical and R&D efforts. Before he came to Seven Bridges, Bruce was director of big data solutions at EMC, where he helped clients in the life science market build out their analytic platforms. He has previously held positions at Alliance Technologies, CallidusCloud, and GlaxoSmithKline.

About Seven Bridges

Seven Bridges is the biomedical data analysis company accelerating breakthroughs in genomics research for cancer, drug development and precision medicine. The scalable, cloud-based Seven Bridges Platform empowers rapid, collaborative analysis of millions of genomes in concert with other forms of biomedical data. Thousands of researchers in government, biotech, pharmaceutical and academic labs use Seven Bridges, including three of the largest genomics projects in the world: U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genomics Cloud pilot, the Million Veteran Program, and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. As the NIH’s only commercial Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges authenticates and authorizes access to one of the world’s largest cancer genomics dataset. Named one of the world’s smartest companies by MIT Technology Review, Seven Bridges has offices in Cambridge, Mass.; Belgrade; London; Istanbul; and San Francisco.

Press Contacts

media@sevenbridges.com