SAN FRANCISCO — “We are re-thinking everything,” Tony White, chairman and CEO of ABI parent company Applera, said at a breakout session during the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, held here last week.
He declined to provide details on the progress of ABI’s reorganization, which was announced in July 2004.
Instead, Cathy Burzik, president of ABI, offered a list of long-term business and research goals — what it calls “grand challenges” for the next 10 years.
These challenges include: making genotyping routine and inexpensive; locating regulatory genes by comparing sequences across species and evolutionary time; real-time imaging of molecular function at the cellular level; determining how to get a cell to dedifferentiate; finding new ways of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting massive datasets; developing a toolkit to characterize gene functions; predicting three-dimensional structure of a protein or other complex molecule by knowing its gene sequence; and developing an understanding of human cells and tissues well enough to predict reaction to novel drugs and pathogens.
— MOK