Industry: Biotech.
Strategy: Few areas of science are more compelling or more talked about than the genetic revolution. Incyte was the first genome science company to go public. With this first report, we drew on the analogy of Gray’s Anatomy, the classic textbook on anatomy.
From Editorial Section, Introduction:
The New Era of Medical Research
It has been called the stuff of life. Six-feet-long. Spiraling. Thread-like. It is contained deep within each of the more than 100 trillion cells of the human body. Called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, these spiral-staircase-shaped molecules represent the basic units of heredity. Our biological destiny. For within the strands of DNA lie vast volumes of information. Everything from the color of our hair and eyes to our behavioral traits, susceptibility to disease, and the marvel of our memory. DNA is an exceptionally complex labyrinth —like a biological computer program some 3 billion bits long ....
With the Incyte approach, we believe we can crack the code of all codes, and amass an encyclopedia of biological information that can become the Gray’s Anatomy of tomorrow.
Real-Time Molecular Biology
All of the drugs developed in the 20th century are based on mankind’s knowledge of less than 5,000 of the 100,000 genes of the human genome. Think what we may learn from the other 95,000. And think what putting the analysis of this vast information into the hands of researchers at organizations around the world could mean for medicine and the progress of biology in the next century.
Long gone are the day of conducting biology one molecule at a time. Biotechnology, information sciences, robotics, and computers have merged into what we at Incyte call “real-time molecular biology.” Looking forward, the tools we’re developing will evolve from the simple “Polaroid-like” snapshots of today to “moving images” of the profiles of the proteins a cell makes as biological phenomena run their course.
