Rob Brainin Named New CEO at WuXi NextCODE

By Bio-IT World Staff 

March 12, 2018 | WuXi NextCODE has named a new CEO: Rob Brainin, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, has been appointed as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer effective today. Brainin succeeds Hannes Smárason, who will work as a senior advisor for the company as he pursues other entrepreneurial activities, according to the company.

Smárason took on the CEO role at WuXi NextCODE in late February 2017, but his tenure with the company is a long one. He co-founded NextCODE Health in 2013 as a spinout from deCODE Genetics. Previously he had been CFO and executive vice president of business and finance at deCODE from 1997–2004. He oversaw NextCODE's acquisition by WuXi AppTec in 2015 and its merger with the WuXi Genome Center to create WuXi NextCODE. He served as COO until last February.

Smarason’s goal was for, “essentially enable anyone to use the genome across a multitude of applications. That could be anything from research, to clinical diagnostics, to health and wellness,” he told Diagnostics World last summer. He preferred the term “Contract Genomics Organization,” defining an underlying platform for genomic data that brings together everything needed to empower healthcare.  

WuXi NextCode furthered that vision last week with an announcement that the company is partnering with Google Cloud to make its core suite of capabilities—including GORdb, WuXi NextCODE secondary analysis, the Sequence Miner case-control research application, and the Clinical Sequence Analyzer clinical interpretation system—available on Google Cloud and available on the Google Cloud Launcher marketplace. The platform is already available on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Huawei in China.

Brainin has been overseeing the company’s global operations and commercial efforts since September 2017. Prior to that, he worked at Illumina, Thermo Fisher, Life Technologies, and Invitrogen, commercializing technologies and leading businesses that serve life sciences research customers and customers using genomics in applied markets. He holds a degree in economics from Emory University and a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.

“This is an exciting time at WuXi NextCODE as we execute our vision to enable anyone to use the genome to improve health and wellness worldwide,” said Brainin. “Our global genomic data platform is moving from a position of leadership to transforming the future of healthcare. I’m honored to lead WuXi NextCODE alongside extraordinary colleagues and partners.”