Founding CEO Tina “Super” Nova Keeps Genoptix On a Roll

October 2007 at an initial public offering price of $17 a share. The IPO opened at $25 a share, marking an immediate 47 percent gain, and now trades at about $36 a share—which yields a market cap of about $625 million.

Before joining Genoptix, Nova was a rising life sciences executive at San Diego-based Ligand Pharmaceuticals, Nanogen, and Hybritech, where she helped figure out how to obtain and stabilize the prostate-specific antigen the company was developing to help diagnose prostate cancer. In a 2005 profile of “Super” Nova, the San Diego Union-Tribune quoted Genoptix board chairman (and San Diego Xconomist) Drew Senyei, who praised Nova for “a combination of what I think is the key to being a success in the biotech space: a deep technical understanding, the leadership and management skills, and she knows how to motivate people and make things happen in a very complex environment.”

Nova says that Genoptix has a number of advantages over local pathology laboratories, but the key differences lie in its comprehensive and centralized approach to specialized diagnostic services. With 120 subtypes of blood cancers and related diseases, Nova says it’s easy to understand why a recent study of leukemia cases referred to Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center found that 27 percent were misdiagnosed. Confusion also can arise over the appropriate tests, which Nova says is why a staff blood pathologist assesses each case that comes in and determines which diagnostic tests should be used.

Genoptix, has placed increasing emphasis in recent years on expanding its online capabilities by also providing a comprehensive assessment that charts a patient’s progress over time, and by offering a similar comprehensive one-stop diagnosis shop for colo-rectal cancer patients. Nova says she views Genoptix as a “personalized-service diagnostics company,” but she can understand why some people might see it as healthcare IT. As she puts it, any company that places a premium on the quality of its comprehensive diagnostic services “also is an information technology company by default.”

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.