Synteni, Inc.
Company overview. Synteni, Inc. was a privately held, venture-backed genomics startup founded in 1994 by Dari Shalon, a Stanford graduate student who co-developed DNA microarray technology with Stanford professor Patrick Brown. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with manufacturing operations in Fremont, it was backed by Kleiner Perkins and Shalon Ventures (PitchBook). No standalone revenue or headcount figures are publicly available; it was acquired by Incyte Pharmaceuticals (Palo Alto) in a stock deal completed January 6, 1998, valued at roughly $80 million, and ceased to exist as an independent entity.
Products / operations. Synteni developed and sold Gene Expression Microarray (GEM) products — glass slides carrying up to 10,000 fluorescently tagged cDNA elements for measuring gene-expression levels in a single experiment. It marketed completed microarrays (contemporaneous reports cite ~$7,500 per slide), offered hybridization and scanning services, and sold scanners; it deliberately did not sell the arrayer instruments, which were exclusively licensed to it by Stanford. After the acquisition, Synteni's Fremont site became Incyte's microarray manufacturing base, producing chips such as RatGEM that Incyte sold to subscribers of its genomic databases. Incyte discontinued its microarray operations in 2001 during a restructuring.
Patent-litigation posture. Synteni was an operating company, not an NPE: its single tracked case is as a defendant — Affymetrix, Inc. v. Synteni, Inc. et al., filed January 6, 1998, in the District of Delaware and transferred to the Northern District of California. The suit, brought by GeneChip-maker Affymetrix against Synteni and its new parent Incyte Pharmaceuticals together, alleged infringement of microarray patents (including U.S. Patent No. 5,445,934); Incyte countersued.
Notable context. The dispute was part of the formative patent war over DNA microarray technology, spanning Affymetrix patents, Incyte's RNA-amplification (Eberwine/Layton) patents, and Stanford-licensed applications. Affymetrix and Incyte settled all litigation on December 21, 2001, with cross-licenses, dismissal of the Synteni case, and a $4.5 million payment from Affymetrix to Incyte.