Novartis: Tapping into U.S. science

The decision by Novartis A.G. to move its global research headquarters to Cambridge, Mass., from Basel, Switzerland, is as much a comment on an increasingly unfavorable European pharmaceutical market as it is on NVS's belief that the world's best science is currently found in the U.S. While the company is not abandoning its European presence, it is expanding to follow the market and establish more intimate U.S. regulatory ties, and certain technologies and development programs will be transferred to the Cambridge facility.

According to NVS head of development Joerg Reinhardt, the main changes will be in high throughput screening (HTS) capacity. Currently, 80% of the company's HTS is done in Basel, with the remaining 20% done in the U.S. However, that ratio is expected to change to 50-50 when NVS's Institute for Biomedical Research opens, which is set for the first half of next year. ...