VioletStar November 7th, 2006
Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis plans to invest INR5 billion over next five years to set up a research and development facility near the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, the Financial Express reported quoting unnamed government sources. Novartis has sought a 60-hectare site to set up the research facility. The company also plans to set up information technology backup operations along with its research facility, the report said.
Novartis is also building up R&D activities in China with the planned investment of up to $100 million over the next few years in facilities which will focus on cancers related to infectious diseases endemic in Asia.
A 5,000sq m pilot facility on a site in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park is due to begin operations next May, and the construction of a permanent 37,000sq m building for around 400 researchers, mostly recruited locally, will start in July.
Novartis’s chairman and CEO, Dr Daniel Vasella, hinted around a year ago that a new R&D facility in China was being considered and said that scientific expertise in the country was now “rising rapidly”. The aim is to combine modern western and traditional Chinese approaches to medicine research, which it is hoped will also yield diagnostic tools such as biomarkers and gene expression profiling which can be used in the firm’s global research programmes.
The early focus of activity would be on common Asian disorders such as liver cancer due to hepatitis. The B virus affects around 130 million people in mainland China alone, causing an estimated 300,000 deaths annually, it noted.
Other firms upping their investment in China recently include AstraZeneca, which said in May that it had set aside $100 million for a new R&D centre to start operations by the end of 2009, also focusing on cancer. GlaxoSmithKline is also considering expanding its Chinese R&D activities, but the Novartis facility appears to be concentrating on more advanced technology than some of the other multinational programmes in China.
The firm opened an institute for tropical diseases in Singapore several years ago, concentrating on neglected diseases such as dengue fever and tuberculosis.
Violet Star
