DIVERSA PROMISES PRODUCTS, PROFITS

IF YOU WANT TO CREATE RACEHORSES, are you going to start by breeding mules? asks Jay M. Short, chief executive officer, president, and chief technology officer of Diversa when describing his company's approach. No. You'd go for powerful breeding stock, he answers, starting with a racehorse, maybe throwing in a draft horse, and even a gazelle. Similarly, Diversa's technological cross-fertilization mixes broad-based gene discovery, gene manipulation, and molecular evolution to find new chemistries and to optimize enzymes and other molecules. An array of enabling technologies, along with a problem-solving attitude and product-oriented focus, differentiates Diversa from other companies, Short says. The combination seems to be bearing fruit with the recent launch of new enzyme products and a growing slate of development projects in chemicals, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Nearly a decade after its creation as Industrial Genome Sciences and then a few years as Recombinant Biocatalysis, Diversa has bui...