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Oncology drug development and discovery supported by hundreds of employees around the world

Paula Swain is Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Incyte Corporation, a pharmaceutical company based in Wilmington, Delaware. Founded in Palo Alto, California in 1991, Incyte has grown into a $1.5 billion firm that employs hundreds of people and serves patients around the world. Incyte’s pharmaceutical products and research are focused on innovative solutions in oncology therapy. The company’s flagship drug, Jakafi (Ruxolitinib), has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of a bone marrow cancer known as myelofibrosis, as well as polycythemia vera.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You mentioned that you’ve been involved in not just HR for Incyte, but facilities management, environmental health and safety, and so forth. What were those experiences like? What were some of the challenges of finding space for a highly specialized and rapidly growing company?

PAULA SWAIN: 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 robust discovery effort, so when you look at something like 19 compounds in development for a company our size, that is an incredible number. The majority of those have been discovered by our scientists in Delaware, although small molecules within our pipeline, and are being developed by our own employees here in Delaware as well. So R&D is 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. All of our scientists are housed in one building—our chemists and our biologists are on our campus—that is actually a building that was an old John Wanamaker’s building that we transformed into state-of-the-art labs, and it is a beautiful place to work.

We are able to attract top talent from across the country, from across the fellowship programs, across major universities—MIT, Harvard, Penn, you name it—come to work there because of the quality of the science, and that is a important core value of the company. It’s different than a lot of companies that buy their pipelines or in-license products. We take the discovery effort and the development effort very seriously, and that’s 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 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. It was a vacant John Wanamaker’s building. It had been vacant for about seven years. We were looking to find our own headquarters building. We found it and started that up. We felt like that was an ideal location, primarily because it wouldn’t change anyone’s commute—it literally was half a mile away. We walked through the building. It had very, very high floor-to-ceiling space, and it just was a cool building. It’s almost a retro building.

We renovated that building. I was already taking on facilities. It was much easier just doing the leases, but then started the other operation, 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. We made the decision that we would turn that building into a complete lab space. 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.

What we’ve done is establish a campus. The new building opened last October and so they are on the same site and 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, share a big cafeteria. It’s helped facilitate the collaboration between development and discovery, and so we see the campus helping to foster the collaboration we want. We are also planning to do some additional building. We have some additional property that we have purchased, and so we’re thinking about what our next buildings are going to look like, because we still need additional expansion space.

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