The integration with Amgen coincided with the beginning of large-scale whole-genome sequencing at deCODE and the imputation of that data throughout the company's Iceland dataset. With that data, Stefansson and his colleagues at Amgen believed that genomics could be transformative to drug development in a way that was not possible with only SNP-chip and GWAS data.  Importantly, they could identify rare, high-impact mutations affecting common phenotypes — in brief, the most extreme versions of common diseases — yielding drug targets with potentially better validated and more tractable therapeutic potential. This "rare-for-common" approach is now being followed by many drug companies. The identification of ASGR1 was an example of this and was taken into drug discovery to develop novel cholesterol-fighting drugs.  