SAN DIEGO — For years, Novartis was known for advancing drugs based on their scientific odds of success, regardless of the size of the market awaiting those products. But the company is betting that, in order to blossom, it’ll need to more carefully prune its pipeline in the future.
The Swiss pharma giant, which has a market value of $330 billion, recently cut six early-stage programs, most of them in solid tumors. The move is part of an ongoing business-conscious shift by Novartis, which in 2023 jettisoned 10% of its pipeline to focus on high-value medicines.
To understand how these decisions are made, STAT spoke with Fiona Marshall, Novartis’ head of biomedical research, who was in San Diego for the groundbreaking of a $1.1 billion research hub the company is building here following its acquisitions of local firms such as Kate Therapeutics, Regulus Therapeutics, and Avidity Biosciences.
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