Nabsys back in business

NABSYS, which closed in September, has reopened at its Clifford Street office in Providence, according to founder and CEO Dr. Barrett Bready. / COURTESY NABSYS
NABSYS, which closed in September, has reopened at its Clifford Street office in Providence, according to founder and CEO Dr. Barrett Bready. / COURTESY NABSYS

(Updated 9:57 a.m. and 1:43 p.m.)
PROVIDENCE – Nabsys has completed a financial restructuring and is back in business, operating out of its Clifford Street office.
The genomics firm is being led by founding CEO, Dr. Barrett Bready. Other members of the original team, Chief Technology Officer John Oliver, Executive Vice President of Product Development Steve Nurnberg, and Vice President of Software and Informatics Michael Kaiser also have returned to the company.
Bready, who served as CEO of Nabsys from 2005-2014, raised $50 million to develop the company’s high-definition electronic DNA mapping platform.
Early last year, under different leadership, the company changed direction, into an ultimately unsuccessful technical approach. In September, the company closed, laying off approximately 40 employees.
Upon Bready’s return in October, he brought back the technical leadership team and re-focused the company on its core technology.
“I’m grateful that all members of our technical leadership team have returned to Nabsys in recent months,” Bready said in a statement. “The fact that we were able to get the team organized so quickly meant that very little time was lost during this transition period.”
Oliver said they are excited to explore “the potential of this technology as a team and anticipate sharing our progress in the near future.”
Bready on Thursday said he remained “very close to the company” after he left the CEO position in 2014, even though he no longer had a full-time role. Bready said there were multiple offers for the company’s assets after it closed. He declined to reveal how much he paid for the company’s assets.
He said the company has 12 employees.

Richard G. Horan, senior managing director of the Slater Technology Fund, which invested approximately $1 million over the years in the company, said he is delighted that Nabsys reopened, and returned to its core mission that inspired the company’s launch – to develop breakthrough technology for genetic analysis to help realize the “promise of personalized medicine.”
“Renewed efforts to advance this technology to commercialization could not be more timely … with genomics rapidly transitioning from a research to a clinical setting,” Horan said. “It’s been a very important company in Rhode Island’s innovation economy, particularly in the life sciences sector.”
Horan said this is a field which requires a long-term, sustained commitment to bring new technologies to market.

Bready said he is glad to be back in business.
“It’s great having a cutting-edge life sciences company operating in a part of Providence where they’re trying to develop a life sciences cluster. It’s very good for the ecosystem,” Bready said. “Hopefully we’ll be back and better than ever.”
The company is operating as Nabsys, but its official name is Nabsys 2.0 LLC.

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