Steve Lombardi named CEO at Nabsys

STEVE LOMBARDI has been named the new CEO and president of Nabsys in Providence. / COURTESY OF NABSYS
STEVE LOMBARDI has been named the new CEO and president of Nabsys in Providence. / COURTESY OF NABSYS

PROVIDENCE – Steve Lombardi has been named CEO and president of Nabsys Inc., a life sciences company pioneering semiconductor-based tools for genomic analysis.
Lombardi has taken over for Dr. Barrett Bready, who will remain on the company’s board and continue to be an investor. He will assist Bready with fundraising activities.
Lombardi, an industry veteran, started working for the company as a consultant before being appointed CEO. He said he knows the chairman of the board, Stan Rose, who asked him to help him with Nabsys. In addition to taking over operations of the company, Lombardi will serve on its board of directors.
After talking with Rose about the company, Lombardi said he felt it would be a good opportunity for him. In his new position, he will be responsible for driving commercialization of Nabsys technology by expanding its early access customer program and building support.
“We make tools that enable scientists in life sciences, academic researchers, pharmaceutical R&D people, diagnostic developers and give them the means of studying human health and disease in novel ways that allows them to move the knowledge forward for whatever their mission requires,” Lombardi said. “We sequence DNA in a way that potentially has a unique advantage for us in the marketplace and our potential customers.”
“It’s a cool industry to be in. You feel good because your technology has helped scientists treat people’s lives,” Lombardi said.
He said the private company’s goal is to continue to develop the technology and product toward commercialization.
Lombardi said if someone wants to buy a DNA sequencer, it is an expensive, long-term purchase. Through the early access program, the company’s goal is to find the “right set of people to put this through the ringer and say, ‘This is good. Look what I did with it.’ ” He likened the process to “scientific street cred.”
The Nabsys platform utilizes semi-conductor technology to create an electronic detector that can accurately measure label-free single molecules of DNA as they pass through the device. This patented approach produces extremely long read lengths in any sample without sequence-bias. The combination of electronic detection, simple workflows, long read lengths and scalability enables improvements in applications like genome assembly, variant ID and cancer research.
“I am eager to lead this company and its smart, dedicated team in its evolution as a company toward commercial success,” Lombardi said in a statement. “The firm has the potential to deliver unique value that can provide breakthrough benefits for the genomics community. In the short-term, as structural variation is now known to be omnipresent in healthy and diseased cells, a combination of Nabsys data and short-read NGS data can answer unmet questions regarding genome structure and function. Our ability to scale our technology in cost and throughput can provide customers in research and diagnostics a long-term solution to their genomic analysis needs.”
Lombardi has more than 35 years of experience in life sciences as a scientist, product manager, general manager and CEO at Applied Biosystems, Affymetrix, Helicos BioSciences and Real Time Genomics.
“As Nabsys continues to grow, we’re maximizing the potential and exposure of our technology,” Rose said in a statement. “By adding Steve’s deep life science commercialization experience, executive leadership experience and extensive industry background, he will lead the company’s overall goals to be a major supplier to the life sciences industry.”
Nabsys, a venture-backed company, was the first company to receive a “$1000 Genome” award from the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health for an electronic approach to sequencing DNA.

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