Executive Vice President of Human Resources, Incyte
Search every verified Paula Swain interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Paula Swain, Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Incyte, has described her role as encompassing HR, facilities, environment, health and safety, internal communications, and the Incyte charitable giving foundation. She stated that she was the third person hired at the company and has overseen its growth from 70 to about 1,200 employees, with global offices in Europe and Japan. Swain said Incyte’s HR function is "high-touch," with employees encouraged to interact directly with staff rather than using automated systems. She also noted that the company’s benefits package is designed to be attractive and that retention is driven by policies that make employees feel they are making a contribution. Swain has also discussed Incyte’s philanthropy program, Insight Involved, which she said includes a charitable giving foundation distributing about $500,000 annually to Delaware organizations, a volunteer day off for employees, and a matching gifts program. She said the foundation partnered with the Cancer Support Community of Delaware to provide emergency financial aid to cancer patients, with a commitment of $100,000 per year over five years. Swain added that the program was created because there was no existing process for broad-based patient emergency funding, and that the foundation operates at arm’s length from patients to avoid accessing patient data.
“We have 19 different compounds against 17 different targets, five of which are late stage.”
“The majority of those have been discovered by our scientists in Delaware and 82% of our compounds in our pipeline have been discovered by our own scientists.”
“We recently established what we call the Incyte Research Institute and all of our scientists are housed in one building — our chemists and our biologists on our campus — and that is actually a building that was an old John Wanamaker's building that we transformed into state-of-the-art labs.”
“We are able to attract really top talent from across the country from fellowship programs across major universities — MIT, Harvard, you name it, Penn come to work here because of the quality of the science.”
“Our philosophy at Incyte is a little bit different than a lot of companies our size — we take the discovery effort and the development effort very seriously and that's really kind of in our DNA.”
“We renovated that whole space; we were in that space about eighteen months and we already outgrew it — we were growing so quickly and made the decision that we would turn that building into complete lab space.”
“The campus really helps to foster the collaboration between development and discovery — we share the space, the cafeteria, and it's helped facilitate the collaboration that we want.”
“We are also planning to do some additional building — we have some additional property that we've purchased and so we're kind of thinking about what our next building is going to look like because we still need additional expansion space.”
“I was asked to help join with the CEO so I was the third person hired at Incyte and have been there 16 years now. In being a small company, I headed up HR but also took on facilities, environment, health and safety, internal communications, and even started the Incyte charitable giving foundation.”
“The company grew from 70 people to about 1200 and we set up global offices in Europe and Japan. We built some buildings and established a campus, so I’ve been responsible for that growth as well.”
“Incyte was started as Incyte Genomics in the late 80s with a successful model establishing a database that housed genomic information. However, by 2001, due to consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry and declining revenues, the board decided to completely change the business model to become a fully integrated biot...”
“To support the new business model, Incyte recruited its first CEO, Paul Friedman, from DuPont Pharmaceuticals, who helped start the business in Delaware and convinced many former DuPont employees to join, giving us a head start with revenue and cash in the bank to fund discovery operations.”
“We set up basic principles focusing on first-in-class compounds and unmet medical needs, particularly in oncology and inflammation, aiming to develop unique treatments for patients without existing options.”
“Our head of pharmacology presented the JAK kinase inhibitor class of drugs as a target, leading to the development of two drugs: Jakafi for oncology, which is marketed in the US, and ruxolitinib, marketed by Lilly. Jakafi was first to treat myelofibrosis and polycythemia vera, rare blood cancers, and remains without co...”
“We're a high-touch HR function and we're bucking the trends where a lot of HR departments rely on websites or call centers; instead, employees stop by my office all the time to ask questions and interact directly with us.”
Larry sits with Paula Swain Exec. V.P Human Resources, Incyte Corporation.
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