 |
 |
| Back Issues |
|
|
|
|
ACS Members can sign up to receive C&EN e-mail newsletter.  |
|
|
 Join ACS |
|
||||||||||||
|
BUSINESS
Basel, Switzerland, will continue to be its corporate headquarters, but a year from now Novartis will call Cambridge, Mass., the home of its worldwide drug discovery effort. And the head of that endeavor will be Mark Fishman, currently professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Ultimately, Novartis plans to expand into nearby space and within another few years employ 900 scientists. They will focus on the discovery of new drugs to treat diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and infectious diseases. According to a company spokeswoman, many of the scientists who work in the current center for those three research areas in East Hanover, N.J., will be offered an opportunity to transfer to Cambridge. Announcing his company's plans in Cambridge last week, Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella said the U.S. provides the talent, the entrepreneurial mind-set, and a pricing and product approval climate conducive to drug research and commercialization. And largely because of those advantages, the critical mass of biomedical research had shifted to the U.S. from Europe, Vasella said. Cambridge was a logical location for the Novartis research center because "it is more and more difficult to attract and retain scientific talent, so we have to go where the talent is. Cambridge has a pool of scientific talent not found elsewhere in the world," Vasella said. In addition to MIT, Cambridge is home to Harvard University, the Whitehead Institute/ MIT Center for Genome Research, and 60 biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Fishman, Novartis' new research head, added that the placement of the new institute recognizes "the junction of academia and industry. This new venture is the perfect way to maximize the synergy." Fishman, who has more than 160 publications to his credit, acknowledged that until now he has "lived in an ivory tower." However, by "coalescing genomics with high-throughput chemistry and meaningful models of disease," he expects the institute will "launch a quantum change in the pace and regularity of drug discovery." The U.S. commitment to health care research is far greater than Europe's, Vasella pointed out. For instance, the U.S. National Institutes of Health budget exceeds $20 billion while the European Union's support of health research is only about $1.8 billion, he noted.
Novartis bypassed its home base in Switzerland, or another location in the EU, just as the European Commission made public a report on ways to improve the competitiveness of its pharmaceutical industry. The report acknowledges that European drug companies are losing out to U.S. firms both in competitive and research terms. U.S.-based Eli Lilly filed comments on the draft report last November in which it criticized delays in pricing and reimbursement decisions by EU member states that impeded the introduction and use of the latest biotechnology drugs. Given the perceived lack of enthusiasm for biotechnology in Europe, it's no wonder that Lilly said earlier this month that it will build a $225 million biotech research and product development facility in Indianapolis and not at any one of its four European research sites. |
||||||||||||
|
Chemical & Engineering News |
||||||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
