There’s a particular uncertainty to studying genomics at its inception—especially if you’re doing so through the lens of economic data. By 1997, genomics was shedding its reputation as a purely academic pursuit, becoming a field with real commercial gravity. Still, the boundaries were fuzzy. Startups and university spinouts worked alongside established research institutes, and the words “genomics company” meant different things depending on whether you were in Boston, Basel, or Tokyo. For analysts or policymakers wanting to quantify the rise of the sector, ISIC 7210—Research and development on natural sciences and engineering—offered a necessary, if not entirely sufficient, framework.
The first step is to pull together the full roster of firms registered under ISIC 7210 in the country or region under study. This produces a list that is, inevitably, too broad: laboratories in a dozen scientific domains, biotech contract research organizations, and, hidden among them, the first wave of genomics ventures. Sorting out which of these actually engaged in genomics research requires digging into business descriptions, grant announcements, and, perhaps most tellingly, the principal investigators listed in research consortia or patent filings from the era.
Academic collaborations are a key signal. In 1997, few genomics companies operated in isolation. Most emerged from, or maintained active ties to, university research labs—sometimes through licensing agreements, sometimes as joint ventures, sometimes simply by employing faculty as scientific advisors. By scanning lists of funded academic projects—national science funding bodies, NIH reports, European Framework Programme records—and matching the institutional affiliations with ISIC 7210-registered firms, analysts can begin to build a picture of who was actually active in the genomics space.
Patent databases are another tool. Firms with a cluster of applications citing genomic sequencing, gene mapping, or related keywords in the mid-to-late ’90s are likely to be relevant. It is rarely as straightforward as matching a company name to a patent. Mergers, acquisitions, and evolving collaborations complicate the mapping. Some patents are assigned to universities or joint ventures, with commercial partners visible only in the background.
The next challenge is to integrate data on commercial R&D spending. Public companies, especially those with ambitions for a major listing, often disclosed research budgets and, sometimes, the share dedicated to genomics. For private firms, press releases about venture funding rounds, collaboration agreements, or even employment figures for research staff can serve as indirect proxies. Where available, sector surveys and industry association reports sometimes included aggregate figures for genomics R&D, broken down by company type or geography.
What’s particularly tricky about the late 1990s is that the genomics sector was so fluid. A university spinout might be incorporated one year, rebrand the next, and be acquired by a multinational soon after. Some startups survived by selling data or platform services to academic consortia, others by licensing early discoveries to pharma giants. Not every company stayed “genomics-focused”—the field’s very definition seemed to shift with each new technology.
Documentation is vital throughout the process. Every step—how academic affiliations were matched, how funding was linked to R&D, how patent assignments were interpreted—should be recorded. The result is never a perfectly clean census, but rather a network: overlapping collaborations, shared IP, and spending streams that flowed as much through research alliances as through standalone firms.
The emergence of genomics companies under ISIC 7210 looks less like the rise of a new industry and more like the coalescence of a new research-business ecosystem. The boundaries were uncertain, the connections tangled, but the momentum was real. Analysts willing to accept a bit of ambiguity—and to layer institutional, scientific, and financial data—can recover the outlines of an industry as it first took commercial form.