Partnering
How the university research, the investor and the collaborators fitted together.
Partnering
University research, industry product
GeneAssess described itself as a joint university and industry partnership. The model was straightforward: the discovery and the mechanistic work happened in an academic laboratory, and the company existed to turn it into tests and, eventually, therapies.
That structure shows in the record. The scientific programme was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, and the company was funded separately by a venture arm set up for exactly this kind of university spin-out.
A partnership of this kind has three natural counterparties: the university that holds the research, the investors who fund the translation, and the clinical and commercial partners who would take a validated biomarker to market.
The three sides
Who the partners were
The university
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey — the academic home of the founder and of the FRY research programme, through Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the School of Public Health and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
The investor
Foundation Venture Capital Group — a venture firm that invests in start-ups run by faculty at or affiliated with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. It invested $500,000 in 2012.
The collaborators
The University at Buffalo and others, whose researchers appear as co-authors and as co-principal investigators on the FRY programme’s funded awards.
What a partner would have been buying
A tumour suppressor with a plausible mechanism, a human tissue correlation across roughly 600 specimens, a pending patent on its diagnostic use, and public funding already behind the mechanism work.