Labs Get Down to Business

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What Simons calls the "Dresden model" has certainly worked for Cenix. The company's team of 26 scientists uses a technique called gene silencing, a procedure that selectively disables (or silences) individual genes. Once a specific gene — in a mouse, for example — has been silenced, researchers can determine that gene's function by the effect its silence has on the rest of the organism. It's kind of like isolating the role a single flute plays in a symphony by eliminating all the flutist's notes from the score. Pharmaceutical firms can use the information gleaned from gene silencing to design more-effective drugs. Thanks to the funding and freedom Echeverri and his two collaborators, Anthony Hyman and Pierre Gonczy, have received, Cenix is now working with Bayer to screen some 6,000 genes identified by Bayer as potential targets for drug development.

Echeverri confesses that Dresden at first seemed like a long shot as a place to create a world-class biotech company with an international research culture. The city was still "a bit backward," he says, and locals hardly spoke English. But Max Planck and the federal and state governments were pulling hard to make it work. When Cenix arrived in Dresden in 2001, it had 11 employees. By the end of that year, it had more than doubled that number and boasted scientists from eight countries. "It has been easy to attract essentially any nationality here, with perhaps two exceptions, who seem to have the strongest prejudices against the former East: West Germans and Americans." Old biases die hard, but in Dresden something new has been born.