As a leader in the global science industry, Invitrogen Corp. says it has been on a “quest to better the human condition through innovations in science and technology” since the company was founded in 1987. Based in Carlsbad, Calif., Invitrogen manufactures products for and offers services to customers in the academic, government research, pharmaceutical and biotech markets.

With more than 4,000 employees worldwide, Invitrogen operates 17 manufacturing sites in nine countries throughout North America, Western Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. It distributes its products to more than 70 countries.

After going public in 1997, the company made a string of acquisitions and focused on developing a strong core business, says Nicolas Barthelemy, senior vice president of global operations. Invitrogen offers products and services designed by GIBCO, Molecular Probes, InforMax, PanVera, Genicon Sciences and other leaders in the scientific community.

“We have strengthened our technologies and branched into new areas including our product lines and services from Molecular Probes and Bioreliance,” Barthelemy says. “We are considered a leader in terms of the products we supply.”

He explains that the time frame for drug development creates long-term demands for the company's products. “If you look at the whole continuum for the discovery of drugs, the process takes a long time,” he notes.

“Developing a drug takes 14-15 years on average, from basic research all the way through commercial production and everything in between. With this array of activities and customers, whether it's biopharmaceutical or pharmaceutical companies, researchers or academic institutions, there are numerous products we can provide to accelerate their work.”

On one end of the spectrum, Barthelemy says, Invitrogen serves customers who handle basic genomics and proteomics research, with products such as transfection reagents, Stealth RNAi, custom primers and labeled antibodies. Invitrogen's products are used during the early part of the customers' discovery efforts to clone, express, screen compounds and understand the function of specific genes, and of the protein they express.

On the other end of the spectrum, Invitrogen produces media and related products to assist biopharmaceutical companies in growing cells and express the protein of interest reproducibly, at a high titer, and with the expected quality attributes.

“For example,” Barthelemy explains, “if a company wants to make a monoclonal antibody product to treat a disease such as MS, the manufacturing process consists in cultivating mammellian cells in large (e.g., 20,000 liters) stainless still tanks.”

The First of its Kind
In June 2004, Invitrogen introduced a new protein microarray. According to Barthelemy, this product will eventually allow researchers to screen thousands of human proteins at a time. “This process used to be very tedious and slow,” he says. “During the screening for potential drug targets, long before before the actual manufacturing of these products, companies test different compounds on the protein believed to play a key role in the pathology of interest.

“Before, each compound had to be tested individually,” he continues. “The technology allows for the simultaneous testing of approximately 4,000 different proteins on what is essentially a glass slide of the size that is used for the common optical microscopy that we have all done in biology class.”

Before the new microarray was developed, this process would have taken several months. Now, it is done in a few hours with a high degree of sophistication, automation and computerization, Barthelemy says.