Ambryx Inc.

As a founding member of the management team of Aurora Biosciences Corp. , a now public company with an ultra high-throughput screening platform for drug discovery, Paul Grayson was at the forefront of the biotech toolbox craze. So was Lubert Stryer, MD, co-inventor of Affymetrix Inc. 's GeneChipand chairman of its scientific advisory board. Then, as now, the two men hoped to reap the rewards of leading-edge biotechnologies without undergoing the long and perilous development cycle of drugs. Several months ago, Grayson and Stryer teamed up to form Ambryx Inc. with the goal of applying biotechnology to an entirely new market. Ambryx will develop products for the food, fragrance and consumer markets based on the biology and genomics of chemosensation. Specifically, the new company will develop molecules that manufacturers can put into products to affect a consumer's perception of taste and smell. In the process, the company will put to use a wealth of discovery technologies borrowed from the drug industry, including genomics tools, transgenic and knock-out animal models, high throughput screening technologies, and bioinformatics.

The company has signed an exclusive license agreement with Harvard University concerning G protein-coupled receptors—a class of proteins known...