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The Day Novartis Chose Discovery
How a Swiss pharma giant built the last great corporate research skunkworks - and why that model may never work again.
And yet, Daniel Vasella — the physician-turned-CEO who had overseen the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz to form Novartis back in 1996 — had just handed Fishman billions of dollars to reignite the company’s internal drug discovery programs. NIBR's ability to move from biological insight to clinical validation with such confidence stemmed partly from their unusual organizational structure: the same scientists who designed the discovery program shepherded their molecules through first-in-human studies. Brian Druker, an oncologist at Oregon Health & Science University, had devoted his career to understanding chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a rare blood cancer affecting fewer than 5,000 Americans annually.
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