Gesham Magombedze, PhD, joins Praedicare with over 15 years of experience in Mathematical Modeling and Simulation in Systems Biology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and over 8 years in Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Mechanistic disease translational modeling to inform drug development. His expertise is in developing and validating mechanistic mathematical models that replicate human disease, therefore creating and simulating virtual patients on the computer. This creates a strong mathematical modeling framework to (i) predict drug mechanism of actions, (ii) predict the disease underpinning mechanisms, (iii) carry out virtual biological experiments, (iv) predict human doses, (v) precise translation of preclinical to clinical results and (vi) simulation clinical trials through simulating virtual human populations. This helps to inform drug development through research and discovery to clinical trials.

He developed novel translational approaches using non-linear transformation factors for translation of preclinical experimental model results to human clinical outcomes. As well as methods combining mechanistic dynamic models with machine learning algorithms to predict and characterize biomarkers for long term treatment outcomes and biomarkers for real time decision making during clinical trials. Before joining the leadership at Praedicare, he worked at Gilead Sciences as the lead mathematical modeling Senior Scientist/Associate Director across Virology, Inflammation and Oncology therapeutic areas, for drug development and translation. Prior to that at the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Experimental Therapeutics, Baylor Institute of Immunology Research, he supported the discovery of novel TB drug combination regimens and the repurposing of different anti mycobacterial drugs to treat non-tuberculosis mycobacteria. Gesham holds an Adjunct Assistant Professor position at Texas Tech University, Health Sciences, School of Pharmacy and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London, MRC Center for Outbreak analysis and Modeling, Department of Infectious Diseases and Modeling in UK, at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA and at the University of Cape Town, Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine and Computational Biology, South Africa. Gesham holds a PhD in Mathematical Biology from the National University of Science and Technology, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and has more than 50 scientific publications.