Paula Swain0:06
I began my career in human resources. I actually grew up in and lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and when I moved to Delaware, the places that were hiring were banks. So I ended up working for Chase Manhattan Bank and managed all of their HR functions here in the Delaware location. While there, I got a call from someone about a job in pharmaceuticals. I am an HR person and I'd never done that before, so I thought, you know what, let's go for the interview and see what happens. And that's really how I ended up at DuPont Pharmaceuticals. I spent 10 years there, started out supporting the R&D groups and then moved into taking over the HR for the whole company. In 2002, DuPont Pharmaceuticals was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb, and I had an opportunity to move with them but chose to take the job with Incyte because it was a startup company. It was established, but they were starting really over in almost a reboot, becoming a fully integrated biotech company. So I was asked to help join with the CEO. I was the third person hired at Incyte, have been there 16 years now. In being a small company, what ended up happening is, I headed up HR, but it was like who can take on facilities? So I got tapped for facilities, started managing facilities for the company. Then as we've continued to grow, took on other responsibilities for environment, health and safety, as well as internal communications. So it was an expanded role. A few years ago, we found our Incyte Charitable Giving Foundation, which I started for the company, and took that on as well. So HR is still my primary role, but we've also done quite a bit of building. We've built some buildings and established a campus, so I've been responsible for that growth as well. So it's been a really interesting 16 years to kind of see the company go from 70 people to about 1200, and we've set up global offices as well. So we're in Europe as well as Japan.
The company was started as Incyte Genomics back in the late 80s. The company did great all through the 90s, the model was very successful. They had established a database that housed genomic information. If you think back to the 90s, that really was the time period where gene therapy was supposed to be taking off. Around the year 2001, there started to be a little bit of consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry, which impacted Incyte. The board decided to take a look and figure out what should the business model be, is this sustainable? They started to see revenues declining. Is this going to be sustainable or not? Ultimately, they made the decision that they wanted to have Incyte completely change the model and become a fully integrated biotech company where we would discover, develop, and commercialize our own products, and hopefully have products that said Incyte on the label. To do that, they knew they needed a new CEO. So they recruited our first CEO from DuPont Pharmaceuticals, Paul Friedman, who was the head of R&D at DuPont. They recruited him to take on this role. He lived in Delaware, he knew that a lot of us who worked for DuPont Pharmaceuticals might be interested in joining him, so he convinced the board to start that business in Delaware. That's really how we got started. We ran both sides for about three years and then we sold the database business off. That really helped us to become almost a startup with an established company, which I think a lot of people don't know. That helped give us a head start because we had revenue coming in, we had cash in the bank, and it helped fund the discovery operation. So that first group, we had the opportunity to decide how we wanted to build the company out. We set up some basic principles. We said we wanted to really look for first-in-class compounds, new classes of drugs. We wanted to look for unmet medical needs, so we wanted to look for patients that didn't have any treatments. We thought the most opportunities were going to be in oncology and inflammation, and that's really how we started. It kind of evolved from there.
I think our first big break is when our head of pharmacology presented the JAK kinase inhibitor class of drugs as a target for us to pursue. There was no other approved drug in that class, and we took that on. We developed really two separate drugs: one for oncology, which is Jakafi, which is our marketed product here in the US, and ruxolitinib, which is the other, which is marketed and/or commercialized by Lilly. When you look at things like myelofibrosis, when approved in 2011, it was first to treat the disease, which is a blood cancer. Then it also received approval in polycythemia vera in 2014. So those two were first to treat the disease, first-in-class in oncology. There's still no competition for Jakafi at this point, so it has been a really great drug and helped a lot of patients with those two rare diseases.
