Human Longevity (HLI), a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company, has announced three senior appointments to help build the company's business and technology platforms.

Bradley Perkins, M.D., joins HLI as chief medical officer, Yaron Turpaz, Ph.D., as chief information officer and Felix Frueh, Ph.D., is the company's chief scientific officer. All three will report directly to J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., HLI's co-founder and CEO.

Perkins will be responsible for leading all clinical and therapeutic operations at the company, which includes collecting and utilizing phenotypic data, development of the consumer clinics business and stem cell therapeutics. Previously, Perkins was executive vice president for Strategy and Innovation and chief transformation officer at Vanguard Health Systems. Perkins began his career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1989.

Turpaz will be responsible for building and growing the company's genomic and phenotypic database business, and will lead all bioinformatics/informatics and software engineering efforts at HLI. Turpaz will be expanding the informatics program at HLI's California facility, as well as building a computing and informatics program and facility in Singapore.

Turpaz previously worked at AstraZeneca as vice president, R&D IT responsible for the global IT organization services, analytics and infrastructure supporting drug discovery and development. Previously, Turpaz worked in Eli Lilly's Singapore Center for Drug Discovery as director of Integrative Computational Sciences. He headed the bioinformatics, data analysis and software development department whose efforts were geared toward enhancing drug discovery and biomarker identification for oncology and metabolic diseases. Turpaz and his group developed and utilized novel computational approaches by integrating genomic, proteomic and other quantitative biological data to improve drug development and enhance clinical trials. While there, he established the Asian Cancer Research Group (ACRG) in collaboration with Merck and Pfizer.

Turpaz also has been senior manager, Bioinformatics and Algorithms Development at Affymetrix. There he managed a team of bioinformaticians, statisticians and software engineers who developed informatics solutions for a variety of microarray applications.

Frueh will lead all genomic operations including non-clinical microbiome testing, high throughput, next generation genomic sequencing and research collaborations and partnerships including the program with the University of California, San Diego/Moores Cancer Center. Frueh also will be instrumental in guiding HLI's collaborations and partnerships with the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry. Frueh previously was an executive partner at Opus Three, a consulting group focused on providing strategic advice in regulatory, reimbursement, technology assessment, collaboration and partnership procurement and investments for the diagnostics, pharmaceutical, venture capital and private equity industries.

Frueh also was president of Medco Health Solutions, where he led a 100 person health economics and outcomes research-oriented team and managed global R&D functions, including multi-million dollar collaboration deals with pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies. Frueh also was the associate director for Genomics at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) during the expansion of the personalized genomics revolution. He established and directed the core genomics review function at FDA/CDER.