The Genesis of GenomeQuest

The company began in the multi-national Human Genome Project. While at INRIA, founder and high-performance computing luminary Dr. Jean-Jacques Codani developed and licensed technology used to map the human genome. The original product, called Biofacet, was a high-powered bioinformatic engine aimed at expert users,created by Jean Jacques Codani, Ph.D., at Gene-IT in France in the late 1990s. Gene-IT hired Ronald Ranauro to head world wide sales in 2002. In 2005, the company received funding and moved to Westborough, Massachusetts, and was renamed GenomeQuest, where Ranauro now is president and CEO, and Codani is chief scientific officer. GenomeQuest improved the original search engine and developed a web-based software application for managing, mining and sharing sequence data. The company has more than 150 customers and growing, including patent lawyers and researchers at pharmaceutical, and biotechnology firms as well as academic labs.