The Day Novartis Chose Discovery
In 2002, Mark Fishman walked into a glass building in Cambridge with an unusual assignment: to turn the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Novartis, into the world’s greatest therapeutics research firm. More unusually still, Fishman was — at least on paper — precisely the wrong man for the job.
The Harvard cardiologist had spent his career studying zebrafish hearts and teaching medical students. He had no pharmaceutical experience and no business training. And yet, Daniel Vasella — the physician-turned-CEO who had overseen the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz to form Novartis 1 back in 1996 — had just handed Fishman billions of dollars to reignite the company’s internal drug discovery programs.
The timing was inauspicious. Fishman was recruited at a moment when pharmaceutical R&D productivity was halving every nine years. In the early 2000s, a dollar of research produced only a fraction of the drugs it generated in 1950. The pharmaceutical industry at large was adapting by acquiring innovative drugs, rather than discovering them in-house. Pfizer was purchasing companies left and right. Merck was cutting research budgets. Even Roche, with its legendary research heritage, was turning to external partnerships. The consensus was absolute: internal R&D was finished.
What emerged from his unlikely hire over the next fourteen years would systematically violate many principles of modern pharmaceutical management. But the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) would achieve something the pharmaceutical industry had considered impossible: Under Fishman’s tenure, 65 percent of the company’s new drug approvals came from internal discovery. Many of these drugs would go on to earn the company tens of billions in revenue. And then, in 2016, Novartis began dismantling it.
