NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Six months after closing its doors, Nabsys said today that it has completed a financial restructuring and reassembled much of its original leadership team, including its original CEO.
According to the company, founding CEO Barrett Bready returned last October, just a month after Nabsys reportedly shuttered its facility. Several members of the original technical development team have also come back, including CTO John Oliver, Executive Vice President of Product Development Steve Nurnberg, and Vice President of Software and Informatics Michael Kaiser.
Nabsys, a Providence, Rhode Island-based spinout from Brown University, has been developing a semiconductor-based nanodetector technology for single-molecule DNA mapping, with possible applications in structural variation analysis, genome mapping, and, ultimately, DNA sequencing. Between 2009 and 2013, the company raised $41 million in private equity. Originally, the firm was planning to commercialize a platform in 2014, with de novo assembly of microbial genomes as one of the first applications.
However, following a management shake-up in 2014, when Nabsys brought in former Real Time Genomics CEO Steve Lombardi as CEO and former Ignyta CTO Tony Shuber as CSO, the company switched its focus to cancer applications and human structural variation analysis and was developing a new generation of chips with larger numbers of nanodetectors.
In a statement today, Nabsys said that under the new management, the company "pivoted to a different and ultimately unsuccessful technical approach" in early 2015. Bready has now refocused the company on its core technology.
"The fact that we were able to get the team organized so quickly meant that very little time was lost during this transition period. The past six months have been the most productive in the company's history," Bready said in a statement.
"We are excited to once again be exploring the potential of this technology as a team and anticipate sharing our progress in the near future," Oliver said in the statement.
Nabsys did not provide details about its financial structuring, but according to a local news report last December, Bready purchased the company for $500,000 and assumed $100,000 of its debt.