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

It must be nice to be the CEO of a life sciences company that sells itself.

When Tina Nova stepped up to the microphone at the Roth Capital Partners Growth Stock Conference in Laguna Niguel, CA, yesterday, the Genoptix CEO was playing to a nearly full house. Investors and analysts occupied all but two or three seats, which wasn’t the case in many of the other presentations given on the last day of the three-day conference (even though it drew a record total of more than 3,000 attendees, according to organizers).

Carlsbad, CA-based Genoptix (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GXDX]]), as Nova succinctly puts it, “delivers personalized and comprehensive diagnostic services to community-based hematologists and oncologists.” Doctors who specialize in blood

Tina Nova
Tina Nova
malignancies, such as leukemias and lymphomas, send samples of their patients’ bone marrow to Genoptix. Community-based, Nova explains, simply means that most of these patients are treated in specialized neighborhood facilities instead of hospitals. The company, which operates a variety of diagnostic equipment and currently has 33 blood pathologists on staff, helps oncologists determine the best course of treatment.

“What we return to physicians is not individual test results, but a comprehensive diagnosis that enables the doctor to get that patient on the proper cancer drug at the right time,” Nova says. The company uses FedEx to deliver patient samples within 24 hours, whether they’re from Maine or

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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.