Genesis Research sells mapping software company

Struggling Genesis Research and Development Corp said today it had sold its Cartesian software for an undisclosed sum.

The sale, including patent rights, understood to be for less than seven figures, was to development partner Reel Two, a San Francisco-based developer of data-mining products for life sciences.

"Reel Two has worked closely with Genesis to develop the Cartesian software and is the ideal party to take the product to market," said Genesis chief executive Stephen Hall.

Reel Two will assume full responsibility for product development and marketing, and will share revenues with Genesis. Genesis' proportion of revenue was undisclosed although Mr Hall said it was a "substantial share".

Cartesian software is designed to perform very fast searching of genetic sequences. It has potential applications to dramatically increase research productivity when analysing gene expression and constructing maps between genomes.

Genesis, which retains the right to use the software, said it had reduced analysis and computation time by many orders of magnitude, reducing tasks that had previously taken many months on a large computer cluster down to hours on a single machine.

Reel Two chief executive Michael Faust said it planned to seek licensing and partnership opportunities with research institutes, biotech firms and pharmaceutical companies.

Genesis shares were unchanged on their all time low of 29c today. The stock traded as high as $7.55 in 2001 during the high tech biotech boom of the early 2000s.

Mr Hall said Reel Two had more expertise in marketing life sciences products.

Cashflow at Genesis was running right on plan, he said.

Commenting on Genesis' share price, Mr Hall said the New Zealand market was not well disposed towards biotech stocks and did not understand the industry well.

"Other markets understand that one product failure does not mean that the company is doomed. They understand the long-term and high risk nature of the market better than our investors do."

In the last two years, Genesis has abandoned a number of its biggest development projects including childhood eczema drug AVAC late last year and a psoriasis treatment drug, PVAC, in 2003.

Today, its main focus in the health area is on RNAi (Correct) therapeutics -- a new area of anti-allegy drugs.

Mr Hall said that like all therapeutic products, a final product in the market was a number of years away, but Genesis would look to licence or partner the programme as it did with PVAC when it raised $27 million during its Phase I trials.

- NZPA