This summer Codon enlisted Craig Muir, the roboticist who industrialized gene-finding at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, to help build its factory in Cambridge.
While its gene-finding techniques may have been high-tech, Millennium's approach to creating the chemical was delightfully old-fashioned: It relied on the insight of its chemists.
But Love says he thinks the genome maps miss a significant number of genes that Hyseq has found and says their gene-finding algorithms were perhaps at fault.
This summer Codon enlisted Craig Muir, the roboticist who industrialized gene-finding at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: MLNM - news - people ), to help build its factory in Cambridge.
FORBES: Drew Endy aims to reinvent the biotechnology industry.
In a few years, all the investments Bayer has made in gene-finding companies such as Curagen (nasdaq: CRGN - news - people ) could lead to promising new drugs.
Love insists that Hyseq has a unique gene-finding technology that will help it discover genes that have been missed both by other gene database companies and by the U.S. government-funded Human Genome Project.
But developing drugs from genes has turned out to be very difficult, and now companies like Myriad and Millennium have turned to buying potential drugs to tide them over until drugs based on their gene-finding technology can make it to market.
One example: The gene that makes the Epogen protein is expressed in only a few scattered tissues and is hard to detect by conventional gene-finding methods, which discover genes not by looking at DNA but by examining the RNA messengers that ferry genetic code between the DNA itself and the cellular machinery that make proteins.
By 2003 Illumina scientist Kevin Gunderson invented a chemical process that allowed Illumina to get more-accurate results, even as it packed more DNA on a chip. (Instead of the lithography that Affymetrix uses, Illumina affixes DNA to tiny glass beads packed in the chip.) "I've been in the analytical sciences for 30 years, and I've never seen anything this accurate, " says John W. Hooper, chief executive of Quebec gene-finding firm Genizon, an Illumina customer.
DeCode hopes its heart gene finding will help it transform from an esoteric gene-sleuthing shop into a highly profitable biotech company.
This disappearance of people with an E-4 gene from the aging population is a "remarkable finding, " say the University of Helsinki scientists who did the study.
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