Can you give an example of how Invitrogen can speed up drug discovery?
With the large pharma companies, their problem — everyone’s problem — is they want to fail early. But they got into animal models, and it takes a long time to answer the question. We have deep expertise in cell biology and understanding cell function through our Gibco business. The question is, can Invitrogen develop cell-based assays that don’t exist yet, leveraging your cellular engineering expertise, so you could perhaps do a lot more in vitro than ultimately in vivo, and so shorten that cycle time and animal testing that has to get done? Where do you see the role of IT, and InforMax in particular, in the drug discovery process? If you take a systems engineering view of how some concept-to-creation biopharmaceutical has to be brought to fruition, IT is the critical linkage … We’re huge believers in it; we’re very happy InforMax was acquired [in 2002]. It’s a good piece of software, but … it doesn’t do the full linkage among our products that it has to, so we’ve got to substantia
