In South San Francisco, California, Genentech Inc. (whose shares are owned mostly by Roche) is marketing Herceptin, a new drug to fight breast cancer that is targeted at the 25% to 30% of breast-cancer patients who have a specific genetic malfunction. A few years ago, there would have been no way of knowing which women were best suited to treatment with Herceptin -- and the drug might never have made it out of clinical trials. Now, though, advanced genetic testing makes it possible to target the right patients -- and avoid months of futile treatment for everyone else.

And in Nutley, there is talk that genomic data will make it possible to size up a drug's side effects with much greater clarity before embarking on lengthy animal experiments. It will be possible to run simulations or GeneChip experiments with potential new drugs to find out whether they might interact in troublesome ways with the functioning of healthy genes.

Finally, genomics will lead to new diagnostic tools that will make it much easier for doctors to size up patients' health and predisposition to disease. That's especially intriguing for Roche, which has a big diagnostics business in Europe and the United States. Traditionally, Roche's diagnostics and pharmaceutical businesses haven't interacted much, but a shared interest in genomics makes for greater collaboration ahead.

Each of those initiatives is running on a different timeline. Some parts of Roche's business will be aggressively reshaped in the next year or two; others may take five years or more to feel the full effects of the most recent genomics breakthroughs. "This isn't just a matter of turning on a light switch," says Klaus Lindpaintner, Roche's global head of genetics research.

Yet eventually, Roche executives believe, all of the retooling within their company will be mirrored by even bigger changes in the ways that all of us get our medical care.

"Diagnosis and treatment will come ever closer," Roche's CEO, Franz Humer, predicts. "We're already seeing that with Herceptin for breast cancer. Before long, we'll see it with high cholesterol or osteoporosis." Or, as Roche's research chief, Jonathan Knowles, puts it, "The future will be all about rational prescribing. We'll finally know exactly what medicines to give to exactly which people."

George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor based in Silicon Valley. Contact Holly Hilton by email (holly.hilton@roche.com).

Sidebar: Roche's Big Discovery: Teamwork

A huge green T-shirt stretches across the wall of Joseph Grippo's office, with the word "Glucogen" written alongside a picture of a sugar-maple tree. It looks like a souvenir of a long-ago pep rally. No wonder: It is indeed a relic of a different era.

In the mid-1990s, research scientists at Roche were divided into competing teams -- with a mandate to fight one another for resources. Teams took on names that were medically interesting or outright heroic. Glucogen jostled against Camelot, Tsunami, and other rivals.

"There was a great burst of energy at first," Grippo recalls. "Teams made banners and worked late into the night." But as Roche's internal wars stretched on, the ultracompetitive approach became less appealing. Faltering projects became almost impossible to abandon, because scientists' careers were so wrapped up in them. Researchers were tempted to hoard technical expertise they picked up along the way, since sharing might allow others to catch up.

Finally, Roche disbanded its intramural competition in 1998, in favor of a more collaborative approach. "If you have just a few drug-discovery targets," says Nader Fotouhi, a vice president for discovery chemistry, "the competing-team approach can work. But if you have a large number of targets, it can't work."

In Roche's New Jersey GeneChip lab, researcher Hongjin Bian has won worldwide acclaim during the past three years for developing savvy ways of handling the chips and reading the results. She has been encouraged to share her techniques with Roche colleagues as far away as Europe and Japan. With the old system, her insights might well have been kept secret.