Harry Stylli's hobby, cryptozoology, speaks volumes about his career choice. Cryptozoology is the search for and study of animals whose existence is disputed. In some ways, it is not much different from his career in drug discovery, where he looks for therapies that don't yet exist.

Stylli began his career by combining science with industry: he worked on his PhD in pharmacological chemistry at King's College London with the help of a grant from Amersham International, a diagnostic imaging company now part of GE Healthcare. (see CV)

His next stop was at industry giant Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline) where the self-described “frustrated entrepreneur” did something considered unusual at the time: he completed an MBA degree through the Open University. The degree allowed him to combine his understanding of science with the knowledge of the demands of business. He applied these lessons to his job, integrating elements of manufacturing strategy to the drug-discovery process.

After almost ten years of working in big pharma, in 1995 Stylli left to pursue his entrepreneurial bent in San Diego, California. There, he co-founded Aurora Biosciences. Taking a chance at Aurora was an invaluable experience that helped define his career, explains Stylli. It allowed him to go through an entire life cycle of a company, from founding to building and eventually leaving.

In 2001, the company was sold to Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, providing an objective measure of success for the firm and making Stylli a healthy profit. He is proud that the technology and people associated with Aurora early on remain leaders in the biotech industry. “Aurora 'DNA' is very much alive in other companies,” he says.

Since then, Stylli has been at the helm of Xencor in Monrovia, California, and San Diego-based CovX. But he says his most significant challenge will be in his current job as chief executive and president of Sequenom, a San Diego genetic-analysis tool maker. “This is a company that has tremendous potential and promise, and hasn't managed to realize it yet,” he says.

Stylli believes that biotechnology will be the engine of innovation in the forthcoming “age of healthcare”. In this new age he predicts there will be dramatic changes in healthcare, with biotech bringing into development therapies that will move what was once viewed as science fiction or myth into reality.