Healx announces the appointment of a new CTO

Meri Williams joins from challenger bank Monzo, where she helped scale the engineering and data team by 500% and led a significant investment in platform resilience and business continuity as Monzo’s customer base grew to over 4M.

Well-known for leading and scaling world class tech and product organisations, Meri will now focus on deepening Healx’s investment in artificial intelligence and data and broadening the use of modern product engineering approaches to build world-class drug discovery tools.

Prior to Monzo, Meri led technology teams at award-winning online print and design company MOO, Marks and Spencer, and the Government Digital Service, having spent the first ten years of her career at Procter & Gamble.

She also chairs The Lead Dev conference, which focuses on levelling up technical leaders and runs events in London, Berlin, New York and San Francisco. She’s also a published author, tech advisor to equitable venture firm Kindred Capital, international keynote speaker, and a trustee on the board of Stonewall, the UK’s leading LGBTQ rights charity. 

“Meri brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the company. She 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.” – Tim Gulliams, CEO and co-founder of Healx

Meri arrives at an important time for the company, as the team looks to expand, and advance their clinical pipeline. In line with Healx’s mission to identify and progress novel therapies for the 95% of rare diseases currently without approved treatment, Meri will be responsible for Healnet, Healx’s AI-driven drug discovery platform.

Healnet integrates data from multiple sources, including biomedical research and scientific literature, to form the world’s most detailed rare disease knowledge graph. Most recently, this technology has been applied to identify potential combination therapies for COVID-19.

Accelerating treatments for rare diseases

Commenting on her appointment, Meri Williams, CTO, said: “I couldn’t be more excited to join Healx. They have an incredibly inspiring mission, a fantastic team, and some genuinely groundbreaking technology which they’re applying to a complex and important set of problems. As a rare disease patient myself, I’m all too aware of the lack of investment in treatments for rare conditions. I’m 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.” 

Meri’s appointment consolidates Healx’s focus on technical excellence and is the latest in a stream of senior hires. Findacure co-founder Dr Anthony Hall joined the team in February as Chief Medical Officer, and Dr Bruce Bloom, founder of Cures Within Reach, came on board in November as Chief Collaboration Officer and lead of the Rare Treatment Accelerator. Meri now looks to scale both Healx’s team and technology and will be ramping up recruitment across a range of product, design, engineering, AI, data science and bioinformatics roles in the coming weeks.