Five Prime Therapeutics Inc.

The model of this well-financed two-year-old start-up harks back to the mid-to-late 1990s when technology promised to provide industrial-age solutions to the handcraft of drug R&D. Its investor list likewise recalls earlier years: one of its key venture funds, Kleiner Perkins, once at the forefront of biotech investing has largely remained on the sidelines since the mid-1990s. Even its vocabulary echoes older ambitions--FivePrime aims to mine the pharmanome, just as companies in the late 1990s aimed to mine the proteome, peptidome, metabolome, cytome, glycome and cellome.