When Sean Harper took over as Amgen’s head of research in 2012, one of his first moves was to get the biotech giant to pay $415 million to buy DeCode Genetics, a struggling company in Iceland well-known for the huge DNA database it had built.
Today that bet paid off as scientists at DeCode describe how they found a specific DNA defect that lowers the chance of having a heart attack by 35 percent, which they call the largest such effect ever found.
DeCode’s DNA detective work is “outstanding,” says Sekar Kathiresan, a scientist at the MIT/Harvard Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.