Genesis sells Cartesian software to partner

Struggling research company Genesis Research and Development has 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 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.

Genesis shares closed down 1c to 28c yesterday, an all-time low. The stock traded as high as $7.55 in 2001 during the high-tech biotech boom of the early 2000s.

- NZPA