ENDURING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
Market-leading products and services combined with strategic acquisitions position Invitrogen well for the future. None of this technological capability matters, however, unless we have the support of our customers. That’s why we strive to be more than just a supplier. Our goal is to be an essential partner.

Every day hundreds of Invitrogen technical sales people consult with scientists worldwide to understand their needs. Often, we are conduits for new scientific advancements made somewhere across the globe. At other times, we are advisors recommending new tools that will take a research project to the next step. In Hong Kong, a researcher might discover how our LUX™ primers can facilitate her work on SARS. In London, a lab technician might learn that E-PAGE™ 96 gels are exactly what he needs to analyze proteins. And in New York, a graduate student might discover just how easy it is to clone a gene with our Gateway Technology. These discussions occur every day across the globe. They are the lifeblood of our company. They are the product of trust. And they are as important to a customer’s research as they are to our company’s success. Some of our biggest ideas have come from these intimate conversations about science, a researcher’s needs, and how we can help. Preserving this trust between Invitrogen and its customers is paramount to all our employees. We listen, understand, and take the action necessary to meet their needs and move
research forward.

Listening to our customers guided us to introduce a new licensing policy for our market-leading Gateway Technology in November. Previously, customers who purchased Gateway were restricted in their ability to clone genes and conduct downstream experiments with those clones. Under the premise that a less restricted approach would encourage more research, we created Gateway open architecture.

Under the new policy, researchers who purchase Gateway can create and freely distribute clones within the scientific community so that others may learn from their work to further our understanding of life. In the world of science, knowledge is built by sharing information. Kevin Auton, chief executive officer of NextGen Sciences in Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, strongly believes this too, as he remarked, “By opening access to Gateway Technology, many research groups and commercial suppliers will now be able to create gene libraries and distribute these as a resource for all researchers. We at NextGen Sciences applaud Invitrogen for this bold step and anticipate that Gateway will become the industry standard in gene cloning and protein expression.”

Gateway Technology is now available to serve as the common language for functional biology. By using our clone collection or another created by researchers worldwide, scientists now have a universal tool to study genes or proteins and the role they play in disease or potential therapies. When our technologies enable research results and make the difficult possible, we know we’re accelerating biological understanding. We know we’re making a difference.