The other cautionary tale is Affymetrix, the company that used to dominate DNA chips.
DeCode agreed to buy 100, 000 DNA chips, more than any customer had ever bought.
Tiny strands of DNA hidden inside prostate tumors offer clues, studied via DNA chips and other exotic new technologies.
DeCODE's new service will allow anyone to get one million points on his or her genome scanned using newfangled DNA chips.
More quietly, it presented genetic studies using Affymetrix DNA chips that tried to identify why some patients were helped and others weren't.
Friend used DNA chips to examine several potential medicines, some of which Merck had axed because animal studies showed risks of side effects.
No single customer represented more than 10% of those sales--meaning Merck could well be the largest consumer of DNA chips in the world.
Affymetrix invented DNA chips in 1989 and long dominated the field.
The DNA chips, in combination with Rosetta's software, flagged the duds from the drugs as well as the animal studies, but more quickly and cheaply.
Illumina started making DNA chips, an early technology for detecting mutations.
Navigenics, Iceland's DeCode Genetics and 23andMe, whose investors include Google and Genentech, use DNA chips to give people preliminary data on their risk of a variety of diseases.
Biotech firm Hiberna, hatched last year with undisclosed funding from Boulder Ventures, has used DNA chips to spot 15 genes that appear crucial for protecting tissue during hibernation.
More recently studies using DNA chips have found that vitamin D can raise or lower the activity of at least 1, 000 genes, says McGill University molecular biologist John White.
The company will initially use DNA chips from biotech firm Illumina for the service, but it says it will use a variety of other technologies in the future as they become available.
Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ), the world's third-largest drug company, is using gene expression arrays, also known as DNA chips, to keep clinical duds from reaching expensive animal or human trials.
The company will initially use DNA chips from biotech firm Illumina (nasdaq: ILMN - news - people ) for the service, but it says it will use a variety of other technologies in the future as they become available.
Researchers have been toying with ultrafast miniaturized labs for a decade, shrinking single-function gear--such as machines for sizing DNA strands--onto chips, but combining multiple functions is difficult.
Your list will also reveal the skills and capacities that are so embedded in your work DNA you may forget to see them as bargaining chips in selling Brand You in your next negotiation.
But the Santa Clara, California company has always been its mother's child, with Dai supplying a majority of the company's cultural DNA. Marvell, which makes high-speed chips for disk drives and communications gear, has great designs that outperform older chips made by giants like Intel, Texas Instruments and Broadcom.
In particular, this sensitivity makes the new chips better at searching for strands of DNA. At the moment, such searches require the number of DNA molecules in a sample to be multiplied using a trick called the polymerase chain reaction before there is a decent chance of detecting the target.
These are tiny glass chips dotted with thousands of microscopic wells where DNA fragments react with other chemicals in order to measure the activity of genes or identify genetic variations.
Meanwhile, competition between Affymetrix of Santa Clara, Calif. and upstart Illumina in San Diego led to rapid declines in the cost of SNP-measuring chips, glass slides on which tiny pieces of DNA are affixed like bits of Velcro.
"The beauty of this system is that we do not need to modify the item being protected in any way with tags, chips or ink - it is as if documents and packaging had their own unique DNA, " said Professor Cowburn.
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