Last August, Kunhua Chen, CEO at Exon Biosystems—a San Diego–based contract research organization (CRO) specializing in protein services—got a request from Elan Pharmaceuticals for a quote to sequence 14 antibodies. Recognizing the fit between his company’s abilities and the requested work, he responded right away. Two weeks later he got an email that Elan was ready to order. A month after that, he struck a deal for $80,000—the biggest project in the company’s three and a half year history.
The request came through an online service called Assay Depot, which Exon Biosystems had joined when Assay Depot started the year before. When the service’s sales team came and pitched their idea to Chen—basically an online marketplace for service providers in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries—he immediately thought it would be good for his company, which doesn’t have much of a marketing team. “Our company’s basically focused on research,” he explains. ...
