InforMax has promoted James Bernstein to president. He retains his COO title and reports to Alex Titomirov, CEO and chairman. Bernstein has served as an InforMax director since its inception in 1990 and was appointed COO and executive vice president of strategic development in 1998.
Bernstein is also a founder and director of Age Wave, a holding company that develops businesses driven by population aging, and chairman of Age Wave Impact, a relationship marketing company focusing on the population that is older than 50 years of age.
He founded and is a former CEO of General Health, an information publishing company in the field of health risk assessment and management.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., has promoted Mark Murcko to chief technology officer and chair of the scientific advisory board and John Thomson to vice president, research.
Murcko and Thomson will report to Vertex’s president, Vicki Sato. Murcko will be responsible for identifying and incorporating new technologies in research and development. Thomson will be responsible for Vertex’s US-based drug discovery organization.
Prior to being named CTO, Murcko was vice president and senior research fellow at Vertex. After joining the company in 1990 as a founding scientist, he started the company’s modeling, bioinformatics, IS, and cheminformatics groups. Murcko came to Vertex from Merck, where he helped discover multiple clinical candidates against cardiovascular and ocular diseases.