Corporate
The company record, the patent, and who paid for the work.
Corporate
The company record
GeneAssess, Inc. was a New Jersey biotechnology company, founded in 2012, working on a single gene with a single commercial thesis. It occupied an office in New Brunswick, with the research programme run out of the founder’s academic laboratory.
Its intellectual property was a pending patent on the use of FRY in cancer diagnosis and prognosis and in predicting response to therapy — filed as a US provisional in December 2010, and as a PCT application in 2011.
Company details, as published
- Legal nameGeneAssess, Inc.
- Founded2012
- Founder and PresidentHelmut Zarbl, PhD
- Head office120 Albany Street, Tower II, Suite 850, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
- What it doesDeveloping diagnostic and prognostic products based on the level of functional FRY protein expressed in cancers
- MissionA joint university and industry partnership to translate research on differential susceptibility to environmental carcinogenesis into new diagnostic and prognostic tests, and therapies
- PatentPCT/US2011/063553 — Novel Method of Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis and Prediction of Response to Therapy (US provisional 61/419,975, filed 6 December 2010)
- Websitewww.geneassessinc.com (the original; the domain now serves a parking page)
The patent
What was actually claimed
From the founder’s own patent list, and from the competing-interests statement of the 2013 paper.
Provisional
US Provisional Patent 61/419,975, filed 6 December 2010.
Title: Novel Method of Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis and Prediction of Response to Therapy.
PCT
PCT/US2011/063553, filed in 2011.
Licensed by GeneAssess, Inc. Co-authors named in the paper’s disclosure: Jessica C. Graham and Helmut Zarbl.
The claim
Use of the FRY gene in cancer diagnosis and prognosis, and in the prediction of response to therapy.
The company was developing diagnostic and prognostic products based on the level of functional FRY protein expressed in cancers.
Funding
Who paid for the work
Three public awards and one company service contract, all from the founder’s curriculum vitae.
2013–2017
GeneAssess, Inc. Service Contract
Analysis of FRY gene expression and mutation as biomarkers of breast and prostate cancer progression.
2014–2019 · $1,832,850
NIH / NCI R01
Epigenetic Silencing of the FRY Carcinoma Susceptibility Gene in Breast Cancer.
2013–2015 · $300,000
DoD Breast Cancer Breakthrough Award
Tumour Suppressor FRY Gene, Tumour Aggressiveness, and Racial Differences in Breast Cancer. Co-principal investigator with Xuefeng Ren, University at Buffalo.
2012
Foundation Venture Capital Group
$500,000 equity investment.
The corporate history, in figures
Three of the published figures behind this page. Every image on this site comes from the company’s own open-access papers.
Corporate history, plainly
What happened to the company
The public record for GeneAssess runs from its 2012 founding and financing, through the 2013 publication and the funded research programme to 2017, and then stops. No dissolution, acquisition or wind-up was found in any source consulted.
The website is a different matter and is documented. The original, www.geneassessinc.com, was captured intact in December 2017. By December 2019 the same domain was serving Chinese-language adult spam — the domain had been taken over. It now resolves to a domain-parking page.
That is why this rebuild exists, and its Sources page sets out exactly what survived and what did not.