How Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New Drugs

When you hear people use the phrase "It's a hits-driven business," they're usually talking about venture capital, TV production, videogames, or pop music—all industries where you don't make much money unless you come up with at least one (and preferably a string of) massively popular products. But you know what's another hits-driven business? Drug development. This week, we present the fourth and final episode in the Persistent Innovators miniseries, originally produced for InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast and republished here for Soonish listeners. It's all about the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, maker of more than a dozen blockbuster drugs like Cosentyx for psoriasis, Entresto for heart failure, and Gilenya for multiple sclerosis. Because companies lose patent protection on their old drugs after 17 years, they must constantly refill their pipeline of new drugs—and Novartis has done that by placing a huge bet on the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), its 2,000-person R&D lab based in Soonish's hometown of Cambridge, MA. In this episode you'll meet Tom Hughes, a biotech entrepreneur and former Novartis executive who helped to set up NIBR in the early 2000s, as well as NIBR's current president, Jay Bradner. They explain why the decision to build NIBR was initially controversial even inside Novartis, and how the labs are structured today to take big but manageable risks and ensure the company can capitalize on biology's growing understanding of the molecular and genetic underpinnings of disease.