AI-powered HealthTech company Healx,聽recently listed on 老九品茶Cloud鈥檚 HealthTech Pioneers list, has appointed Meri Williams as CTO.
Williams joins from challenger bank Monzo, where she helped scale the engineering and data team by 500%.
She will now focus on Healx鈥檚 investment in AI data, broadening the use of modern product engineering approaches to build drug discovery tools.
Prior to Monzo, Williams led technology teams at award-winning online print and design company MOO, Marks and Spencer, and the Government Digital Service, and spent the first ten years of her career at Procter & Gamble.
鈥淢eri brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the company,鈥� said Tim Gulliams, CEO and co-founder of Healx.
鈥淪he has worked with a range of high-performing organisations from digital disrupters to commercial giants, and we are very excited to have her on board to apply her ingenuity, innovation and vision to our work on rare diseases.鈥�
Williams will be responsible for Healnet, Healx鈥檚 AI-driven drug discovery platform. The platform integrates data from multiple sources, including biomedical research and scientific literature, to form a rare disease knowledge graph.
Most recently, this technology has been applied to identify potential combination therapies for COVID-19.
Commenting on her appointment, Williams said: 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 be more excited to join Healx. They have an incredibly inspiring mission, a fantastic team, and some genuinely groundbreaking technology which they鈥檙e applying to a complex and important set of problems.
鈥淎s a rare disease patient myself, I鈥檓 all too aware of the lack of investment in treatments for rare conditions. I鈥檓 truly overjoyed that I will get to use my academic background in artificial intelligence combined with my industry experience leading and scaling world class technology teams to help find treatments for rare disease patients faster, smarter and safer.鈥�
Meri鈥檚 appointment follows a string of senior hires. Findacure co-founder聽Dr Anthony Hall聽joined the team in February as Chief Medical Officer, and聽Dr Bruce Bloom, founder of Cures Within Reach, came on board in November as Chief Collaboration Officer and lead of the Rare Treatment Accelerator.
Williams now looks to scale both Healx鈥檚 team and technology, and will ramp up聽recruitment聽across a range of product, design, engineering, AI, data science and bioinformatics roles in the coming weeks.