Seven Bridges, a biomedical software and data analytics company, has announced plans to expand operations into Novi Sad, Serbia, to meet growing demand for its products and services. Seven Bridges provides end-to-end bioinformatic solutions—including access to datasets, analytic workflows and algorithms, cloud-computing infrastructure, and scientific support—used for drug discovery and development and population health studies.
The company says it currently employs the largest bioinformatics team in the Balkans, is a co-founder of the Digital Serbia Initiative, and has helped pioneer the technological transformation in Belgrade over the past decade.
“Our expansion in Serbia is pivotal to continuing our growth trajectory within the biopharma market and directly in line with our strategic plan,” said Bill Moss, CEO, Seven Bridges. “In order to ensure new team members experience a successful transition, we are developing onboarding and training programs tailored for our engineering team,” Moss added.
“Software engineers in the Novi Sad office will contribute to ambitious and challenging projects that serve scientists around the world,” commented Mladen Srdić, the company’s chief technology officer. “Working closely with functions across the organization, team members will be defining and implementing solutions for efficient data management, computational infrastructure, and user-friendly, interactive analysis visualizations, to name a few,” he added.
Earlier this year, as Bruce Press, the company’s chief revenue officer, noted that the company had enjoyed significant growth within the biopharma and biotech markets, Seven Bridges undertook an executive reshuffle. Moss was promoted to CEO from COO and president of commercial operations. The company said that Moss had been “instrumental in facilitating the development of the company’s newly honed biopharma corporate strategy, working closely with the executive and senior management teams to move Seven Bridges into the next stage of growth.”
At the same time, Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D., the company’s former CEO, took the newly created position of CSO, in order to oversee scientific innovation, solution strategy, bioinformatics expertise, and a portfolio of programs focused on making biomedical data more findable, interoperable, accessible, and reusable.
Seven Bridges is involved in several high-profile projects. The company helped create the Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC)—an NCI pilot program that supports the analytic needs of about 1,500 researchers investigating petabytes of genomic data collected in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Last June, it was selected by the UK Biobank to process and analyze the 50,000 samples associated with the vanguard phase of the Biobank’s creation. The vanguard phase is intended to inform the main phase of the project which will sequence an additional 450,000 participant samples over the next two to three years.
“Given the size and complexity of data being managed as part of the vanguard phase, Seven Bridges has been selected for their bioinformatics and scientific expertise,” said Mark Effingham, Ph.D., UK Biobank COO.
