Genomics Companies Finally Bear Fruit

It took 2,000 scientists more than 10 years and $2.7 billion to map the human genome, an achievement many people thought would lead to a slew of targeted drugs. Years after the breakthrough, biotech and pharmaceutical companies are starting to make real progress using sequencing technology to develop groundbreaking drugs.

Daiichi Sankyo paid almost a billion dollars last month to get its hands on Plexxicon's PLX4032, a melanoma drug that turns off a signal that tells cells to divide. Plexxicon discovered the drug using a gene sequencing machine from Applied Biosystems. More recently, the FDA approved Human Genome Sciences'