Five Questions With: Dr. Barrett Bready

Nabsys founder Dr. Barrett Bready has returned to the genomics company as CEO. / COURTESY NABSYS
Nabsys founder Dr. Barrett Bready has returned to the genomics company as CEO. / COURTESY NABSYS

Dr. Barrett Bready is founder and CEO of Nabsys, a genomics firm. An adjunct professor at Brown University where he teaches biotechnology management, Bready also serves as a commissioner on the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission, a large land redevelopment project in downtown Providence, with a focus on life sciences and other high-tech sectors. The recipient of several awards, including Providence Business News’ Rhode Island Innovator of the Year in 2011, Bready received his undergraduate and medical degrees as part of Brown University’s Program in Liberal Medical Education.

Then under different management, Nabsys briefly pivoted in a different direction, which proved unsuccessful. In September 2015, the company closed; in October of that year, Bready returned to the company’s helm. Earlier this spring, he announced the completion of the company’s financial restructuring and the reinstatement of key members of the original team: Chief Technology Officer John Oliver, Executive Vice President of Product Development Steve Nurnberg and Vice President of Software & Informatics Michael Kaiser. Bready talked with Providence Business News about Nabsys’ evolution and goals for the future.

PBN: Nabsys seemed to have pivoted from its original mission after you left the company as CEO. You indicated that analyzing long DNA is now your mission, as it was originally, and that you have maintained all of the value of the $65 million that was invested to date. Are you and your partners seeking value where others have not?

BREADY: Nabsys uses semiconductor-based devices – similar to computer chips – to read individual DNA molecules electronically. The company had always been focused on using our chips to read very long DNA molecules in order to solve the problem of what’s called structural variation. When I stepped down as CEO, the company briefly pivoted away from looking at long DNA molecules and started looking at short DNA molecules.

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Think of a human genome as a jigsaw puzzle. As a scientific community, we’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out what the pieces of the puzzle look like. (That’s what leading DNA sequencing companies do really well, by looking at short DNA molecules.) What has proven harder for the scientific community in general is putting those pieces together. That generally requires looking at long DNA molecules, and that’s where Nabsys excels.

You can think of Nabsys as providing the picture on the box that tells you how the puzzle goes together. This big picture information or structural information allows you to make important statements about a genome. This structural information is of particular importance in cancer, but it’s important in most diseases. We believe that Nabsys has the best platform in the world for the analysis of structural variation. That’s been the company’s focus for most of its lifetime and that’s what we’re focused on now.

PBN: You could have fired up Nabsys 2.0 in many places, including, for example, Cambridge, Mass. Why did you choose to relaunch the company in Rhode Island, and how have the past six months been the company’s most productive?

BREADY: I had a 100 percent success rate in recruiting those team members I asked to come back; most of them were already living relatively close by. If we had relocated the company to Cambridge, my guess is that everyone would have still come back, but they wouldn’t have been happy about the new location. Additionally, we have been able to stay in the same building, so we didn’t have to move any of our equipment. Thinking longer term, I’ve been saying for a long time now that Providence has a bright future as a life sciences hub. We’re seeing real momentum in that regard; I want to be a part of that.

Over the past six months, we’ve been able to leverage all the work that we did previously and learn just how powerful the platform is for analyzing structural variation in human genomes. It’s exciting to see how good the answers are when we ask the right questions of the platform. So I guess it’s been so productive because we’re asking the right questions and we have a highly developed tool to answer them.

PBN: Do you plan on seeking additional funding for the company; will you approach one of your original funders, the Slater Technology Fund? If so, how much will you seek and what is your timetable?

BREADY: I can’t comment publicly on funding at this point. I will say, though, that Slater Technology Fund, and Rich Horan in particular, have been incredibly supportive throughout the company’s lifetime. With a less than $1 million investment, they helped catalyze more than $65 million of investment in Nabsys and, therefore, in Rhode Island. Nabsys has provided hundreds of person-years of employment in Providence with average compensation in the six figures. Slater should be applauded for its role in that.

PBN: Do you have plans to expand your workforce here; if so, what portfolio of skills and expertise must attractive candidates possess?

BREADY: Yes. We plan to expand and to expand here. The Nabsys team members, both past and present, are some of the most talented people I know. They’ve each been hand-picked for their skill sets and ability to work as part of the team. Some are engineers, some are biologists and some are computer scientists. What’s great is that we’re located within commuting distance of a lot of world-class talent.

PBN: What are the most important lessons you learned from your previous experience with Nabsys?

BREADY: Nabsys was founded with the incredibly ambitious goal of creating a genomic analysis platform that could analyze long, individual DNA molecules electronically using semiconductor chips so as to see human genomes in a new way. We have accomplished that. The platform we have built has the potential to improve the molecular understanding and diagnosis of disease, as well as be impactful in other industries. I’ve learned that a vision like that, one that is both technically and scientifically interesting, and one that is potentially of large positive impact to humanity, can attract a world-class team. And it can attract that team to work in Rhode Island.

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