Blame it on Iceland’s spectacular crash to virtual insolvency. Blame it on the flameout in markets and banks. Or blame it on a biotech industry that more than other high-tech fields depends on the very-long-term largesse of investors who are now running for the hills.

Whomever one impugns, the facts are rolling in hard for one high-tech victim of the new world economic order: Reykjavik-based deCode Genetics.

The Nasdaq Stock Market has warned the company that it must raise its market cap over the $50 million minimum by October 30 or its stock will be delisted. The stock closed at 25 cents a share on Thursday, a 34 percent drop from Wednesday, which pulled the company's market cap below $25 million.

This comes against a backdrop of biotech markets that are not only plummeting, but may be facing particularly hard times as investors pull back from an industry that even in bullish times requires massive amounts of capital and years of R&D before revenues come in.

The coming months and possibly years could be tough even for biotech companies such as deCode that are on the cutting edge of innovative science, but can't raise money and have no access to credit.

Some may disappear, others will be snapped up by Big Pharma companies sitting on piles of cash earned from blockbuster drugs. Some large drug companies already are experiencing an early Christmas as they buy up suddenly undervalued biotech's large and small—the latest being Eli Lilly & Co.'s offer to buy ImClone Systems.

DeCode C.E.O. Kari Stefansson said he is working with the Stanford Group Company to develop a strategy for selling non-core assets and to attract strategic partners.

"We are in the process of creating a smaller, leaner deCode that will devote its efforts and resources to one line of business," Stefansson said in a company statement. He added that the company is "engaged in discussions with potential partners and purchasers for various programs and business units."

In a recent article in Nature News, Stefansson said deCode's financial crunch was caused by poor investments in auction rate securities by the U.S. banks managing its money. "We have been seriously influenced by the American banking crisis and not the Icelandic," he said.

Co-founded 14 years ago by the Stefansson, then a Harvard neurologist, deCode is best known for hunting gene markers for common diseases such as diabetes and cancer, and for deCodeme, a direct-to-consumer DNA-testing website. (The company and its competitors was the subject of a Portfolio.com series "You 2.0.")

The company also has launched an aggressive medical diagnostics business that utilizes its genomics discoveries in proprietary tests for diseases ranging from stroke and glaucoma to cancers of the breast and prostate. It recently reaped headlines for discovering genetic markers for schizophrenia and skin cancer.

It is also a drug company with two compounds being tested in human trials, and recently filed an application with the Food and Drug Administration to begin human testing on a third drug, to treat Alzheimer's disease.

But under the charismatic and mercurial Stefansson. deCode has sometimes struggled as a business. After the 2001 stock market crash, when it was clear its genomics tests and business would take longer than expected to materialize, he reinvented deCode as a drug development company.

In 2006, a promising deCode heart drug failed in late stage clinical trials, which launched the current slide in the company's stock price. Until the recent global collapse, however, Stefansson has kept the stock from plunging too far.

DeCode plans to announce changes in the company in a November 6 webcast.

"But we will survive," Stefansson told Nature News. "We are working on refinancing and restructuring the company. And we are fairly optimistic today that we will succeed."