live in Iceland by analyzing the sequences of hundreds of his living descendants. These studies are avidly followed by foreign and Icelandic media alike, and constitute another type of return that deCODE renders to the society it studies and works within. Product innovation deCODE's scientific leadership over more than twenty years has enabled it repeatedly to pioneer new types of partnerships, products and applications for many aspects of precision medicine. Between 1998 and 2004, the company signed high-profile and innovative partnerships with pharmaceutical companies Roche, Merck, Bayer, Wyeth and others. These alliances provided research funding to advance deCODE's work, with goals of finding genetically validated new drug targets in common diseases; to develop DNA-based diagnostics, that could gauge risk of disease or predict drug response and identify patients most likely to benefit from a drug; and to design "information-rich" clinical trials that would enroll participants with particular genetic variants, with the potential to make trials smaller, more informative, and with a greater chance of success. In 2002, deCODE acquired a Chicago-based medicinal chemistry company in order to discover compounds based on its genetics discoveries and so to begin to develop its own pipeline of new drugs. Over the next few years the company initiated and completed several early-stage clinical trials for potential new treatments for heart attack, peripheral artery disease, and conducted work with partners on asthma and SMA. These were early examples of what would today be called 'precision medicine' programs: using genetics for target discovery and to select trial participants by testing them for disease susceptibility through the same pathway targeted by the drug. In the mid-2000s, deCODE launched a new kind of risk diagnostic focused largely on prevention and wellness. These DNA-based diagnostic tests detected genetic variants identified by deCODE and others that correlated with significantly increased individual risk of common diseases including heart attack, atrial fibrillation and stroke, type 2 diabetes, common (non-BRCA) breast cancer, prostate cancer and glaucoma. The type 2 diabetes test, for example, was based on published studies that showed that approximately 10% of people carried two copies of deCODE's highest impact risk variant, putting them at twice the average risk of developing diabetes, independent of obesity. The medical purpose of the test was "to identify prediabetics at higher than average risk of progressing to full-blown diabetes, and that these same individuals can effectively counteract this added risk through weight loss and through