CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING
NEWS OF THE WEEK MAY 13, 2002 - EDITED BY JANICE LONG & AALOK MEHTA
BUSINESS
NOVARTIS BASES RESEARCH IN U.S. New institute will make its home next to MIT in Cambridge
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ASEL, SWITZERLAND, WILL
continue to be its corporate headquarters, but a year from now Novartis will call Cam bridge, 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. The Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research will ini tially lease 255,000 sq ft of space in commercial property owned by M I T and adjacent to its cam pus. At the site, known as 100 Technology Square, the Swiss company will spend about $225 million to set up offices and lab space for 400. Ultimately, Novartis plans to expand into nearby space and within another fewyears employ 900 scientists. They will focus on the discovery of new drugs to treat diabetes, cardiovascular dis eases, and infectious diseases. Ac cording to a company spokes woman, many of the scientists who work in the current center for those three research areas in East Hanover, N.J., will be of fered 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 cli mate conducive to drug research and commercialization. And largely because of those advan HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
tages, the critical mass of bio medical research had shifted to the U.S. from Europe, Vasella said. Cambridge was a logical loca tion for the Novartis research center because "it is more and more difficult to attract and re tain scientific talent, so we have to go where the talent is. Cam bridge has a pool of scientific tal ent not found elsewhere in the world," Vasella said. In addition to MIT, Cambridge is home to Harvard University, the Whitehead Institute/ M I T Center for Genome Research, and 60 bio tech and pharmaceu tical companies. Fishman, No vartis' new research head, added that the placement of the new in stitute recognizes "the junction of academia and industry This new venture is the perfect way to max imize the synergy" Fishman, who has more than 160 publications to his credit, ac knowledged that until now he has "lived in an ivory tower." Howev er, 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" T h e U.S. commitment to health care research is far greater than Europe's, Vasella pointed out. For instance, the U.S. Na tional Institutes of Health bud get exceeds $20 billion while the European Union's support of health research is only about $1.8 billion, he noted.
Novartis' choice of the U.S. as the center of these research en deavors came as no surprise to company observers. Vasella said many of the same things about U.S. pharmaceutical leadership last year at the inauguration of the new Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) chemistry building in Zurich (C&EN, Dec. 24,2001, page 29). Novartis bypassed its home base in Switzerland, or another location in the EU, just as the Eu ropean Commission made pub lic a report on ways to improve the competitiveness of its phar maceutical industry The report acknowledges that European drug companies are losing out to US. firms both in competitive and research terms. US.-based Eli Lilly filed com ments on the draft report last No vember in which it criticized de lays in pricing and reimbursement decisions by EU member states that impeded the introduction and use of the latest biotechnolo gy drugs. Given the perceived lack of enthusiasm for biotechnology in Europe, it's no wonder that Lil ly said earlier this month that it will build a $225 million bio tech research and product develop ment facility in Indianapolis and not at anyone ofits four European research sites. —MARC REISCH
Vasella
Fishman
in the complex headquarters of Novartis' research operations.
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