Novartis steps up innovation with key focus on oncology

Novartis steps up innovation with key focus on oncology

Swiss drug major Novartis has an enviable drug pipeline in the world, one of the largest for anti-cancer drugs which is the company’s key focus area. The company, which brought the famous blood cancer drug Glivec to the world, spoke about its next breakthroughs, in a conference at its headquarters in Basel. CNBC-TV18's Archana Shukla shares the key highlights. The key takeaway was that the company is looking at a unique approach of using single target for multiple indications, one drug that can treat multiple indications. Also Read: FDA approves Ranbaxy's generic version of Novartis's Diovan The company has about 18 drugs in the late stage developmental pipeline but the focus purely is on oncology. So, for oncology they alone have about 27 drugs both in the early as well as late stage pipeline and the company is also boosted by the recent acquisition of GSKs oncology portfolio which has added molecules for Breast Cancer as well as Myeloma which were missing from Novartis's earlier portfolio. There are two-three key drugs on which the company is betting big, which includes Tasigna, a second generation Glivec to treat Blood Cancer. This also treats patients who have become resisting to Glivec. The company is also doing trials to take it one step further and see if these drugs can be stopped once the cancer goes undetected. It will be a breakthrough in cancer treatment if these trials are promising and the drug goes through because till now cancer patients take drugs life long. If this happens then they would get rid of taking medicines life long once their tumor goes undetected. Those trials in the second stage would also come to India but the dates of that are yet to be finalised. The other targeted therapy for cancer which the company is betting big on is the CART therapy which converts the patients own B-cells to target tumors. They are in the stages of clinical trials and are hoping to file in the US in 2016. There are two other drugs to treat heart failure where the company is very confident. There is no treatment available in the world to treat heart failures, also an indication which is prominent in India with rising incidences of heart failure. The company has two drugs in the late stages pipeline that it is really confident of making through. It has also started fresh trials for those drugs in Asia and India ( Novartis India  ) is a lead contributor in clinical trials for those drugs and would also be one of the countries where they will bring it first. Soaring costs of drug discovery was another key highlight of discussion. Novartis’ global head of development pointed out that costs have soared as much as USD 4 billion per drug. That is the cost of developing one single drug and the reason why patented drugs have become so expensive and the companies are very reluctant to bring down prices is because as part of the innovator driven companies they also need to recover the costs that they have spent on developing that drug. This is a global phenomena, not only with Novartis but all innovation driven companies that are facing high costs, companies like Merk, Bayer, J&J all of them are facing a similar situation. However, they are also working on strategies to look at reducing costs somehow, maybe by using newer technologies or looking at weeding out weaker molecules earlier in the pipeline so that they do not spend a lot of money developing them and fail later.. The other way the management said to look at is in innovating pricing strategies like outcome based pricing strategy which is being discussed in the European nations where one discusses with the payer and the government to decide on a price based on the outcome of the drug, outcome of how well it treats the patient. That could be a way forward even for countries like India to look at pricing especially at a time when the government is looking at formulating a policy for price control of patented drugs these discussions become important and an understanding and a background on how expensive drug discovery is. Also, the need to bring those drugs to the patients at an affordable price which is where drug discovery and affordability and treating patients has to be brought together