Ovation Announces Ed Stepanski, Ph.D. as General Manager, Data

Ovation, a next-generation clinicogenomic data company, today announced the appointment of Ed Stepanski, Ph.D., as General Manager, Data. In this new position, Dr. Stepanski will spearhead the design, build, and delivery of comprehensive human genomic data products in cardiovascular, metabolic, neurological, and immunological disease areas to life sciences organizations. Dr. Stepanski will be instrumental in accelerating Ovation’s development of one of the world’s largest and most diverse platforms for human genomic data.

Dr. Stepanski recently oversaw operations of Real World Data Products at ConcertAI. Formerly, Dr. Stepanski managed an oncology clinical trials network for over ten years, as well as a full-service CRO managing oncology clinical trials.

“Genomic data holds immense value for those developing medicines and biomarkers across therapeutic areas. Historically, genomic data has been costly to acquire and often limited to small, relatively homogeneous patient populations,” said Dr. Stepanski. "Ovation has developed a platform to continuously grow a highly-curated biobank and perform whole genome sequencing with a particular focus on characterizing diverse populations. This model sets Ovation apart as the only company that can generate genomic data linked with comprehensive clinical records across a range of ancestry-based cohorts in a scalable, cost-efficient way.”

Dr. Stepanski’s appointment comes on the heels of Curt Medeiros joining the company as CEO in January 2022. Co-founder and former CEO Barry Wark, Ph.D., has stepped into a new role as Chief Strategy Officer.

Mr. Medeiros, who recently served as President of Optum Analytics, a UnitedHealth Group company, brings twenty-five years of experience in healthcare, including more than a decade in real-world data and analytics across payer, provider, and life sciences markets to Ovation. While at Optum, Medeiros was instrumental in growing their real-world data and analytics business through launching and driving new data, software, and service solutions. These solutions enabled some of the largest and most well-known life sciences companies to leverage real-world evidence to improve patient outcomes.

“Unlocking the promise of precision medicine for patients around the world requires improving the depth and availability of human genomic data,” said Mr. Medeiros. “Ed is a world-class healthcare data expert and I’m thrilled to bring him on board as we continue to develop the world’s first platform for collecting and delivering human genomic data at scale.”

In recent months, Ovation’s data and biobanking platform has achieved significant growth milestones. Ovation has over one million geographically diverse consented biospecimens from over 425,000 unique patients, representing a large range of disease areas.

Medeiros and Stepanski have proven track records of leading teams that delivered high-quality datasets to the largest life sciences enterprises across multiple therapeutic areas. With the addition of their commercial expertise to the Ovation team, the company will continue its expansion to new disease cohorts, while accelerating the development of its data delivery capabilities.

About Ovation

Ovation is a clinicogenomic data company committed to unlocking the potential of human genomic data to accelerate precision medicine. By providing access to high-quality genomic data linked to rich, longitudinal phenotypic data at scale, Ovation enables life sciences researchers to advance biomarker and target discovery development faster, using fewer resources. A diverse network of clinical laboratories use Ovation’s cloud-based LIMS to quickly adopt innovative molecular tests while transforming remnant samples into comprehensive research data. For more information, visit www.ovation.io.

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