Ambryx: Sniffing down a different trail

While the discovery and development of drugs has been profoundly affected by the tools of modern biology - including combinatorial chemistry, high throughput screening, genomics, bioinformatics and functional genomics - other fields have lagged in the application of "industrial" biology. But the fragrance industry in particular should be an attractive place to play, as it lacks many of the regulatory hurdles faced by drugs.

Ambryx Inc. is taking advantage of that vacuum by applying technologies familiar to drug developers - chemical libraries, biomolecular screening, sensory receptor targets and informatics databases - to consumer-oriented fragrance and flavor products. ...