About Paula Swain
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.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Paula Swain's recent appearances.
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Transcript (2 segments)
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Wills Element0:00
I'm Wills Element with Newmark Knight Frank. Today we're interviewing Paula Swain of Incyte Corporation out of Wilmington, Delaware.
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Paula Swain0:06
We have 19 different compounds against 17 different targets, five of which are late stage. Our whole philosophy at Incyte is a little bit different than a lot of companies our size. We have a very, very robust discovery effort. So when you look at something like 19 compounds in development for a company our size, that's an incredible number. The majority of those have been discovered by our scientists in Delaware, all the small molecules within our pipeline, and are being developed by our own employees here in Delaware as well. So R&D is really at the heart and soul of Incyte. Our largest number of employees are part of those organizations. 82% of our compounds in our pipeline have been discovered by our own scientists. And so 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. And it's a beautiful place to work. We are able to attract really top talent from across the country, from fellowship programs, across major universities — MIT, Harvard, Penn — to come to work there because of the quality of the science. And that's a really important core value of the company. Different than a lot of companies who buy their pipelines, they in-license products, we really take the discovery effort and the development effort very seriously. And that's really kind of in our DNA. That's how we started, and that's continued as we've continued to grow. When we first started, we were housed on the DuPont Experimental Station campus. And that really happened because of my prior relationship working for DuPont. They leased us some lab space. As we outgrew that lab space, we looked for our own site, and we ended up within half a mile of our location was a vacant John Wanamaker's building. It had been vacant for about seven years. And we were looking to find our own headquarters building to found it and kind of start that up, and felt like that was an ideal location primarily because it wouldn't change anyone's commute. It literally was half a mile away. And we walked through the building. It had very, very high floor-to-ceiling space, and it just was kind of a cool building. It's a retro building, and it's kind of a cool building. And we renovated that building. And so I was asked to — I was already taking on facilities, it was much easier just doing the leases — but then started the other operation, really moved to Wanamaker's and renovated that whole space. We were in that space about 18 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. So we temporarily moved anyone not with a lab out to another location, rented some space. At the same time, we were building a second building on the same property. And so what we've done is established a campus. So the new building opened last October, and so they're on the same site. The old building houses all of the research labs, which again they're self-contained, but they're on the same campus. We share the space, the cafeteria. And so it's really helped kind of facilitate the collaboration between development and discovery. And so we see that the campus really helping to foster the collaboration that we want. We are also planning to do some additional building. So 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.
