And while a drug may work to fight the disease in one patient, in another person it could produce a totally different effect.
“Pharmaceutical companies are good at development,” says Fintan R. Steele, vice president of communications at Novartis’s Biomedical Research Institute, the company’s main center for research and development.
“They’ll take something that’s been developed in a lab and wrap it up and make lots of it,” Steele says. “But the issue is that there’s not going to be a huge blockbuster drug that cures lots of diseases.”
So, Steele says, Novartis wants to do something different: they want to conduct research at the molecular level, to target the basic mechanisms of the disease, and then design the drugs that fit.
“It’s a more academic way of looking at the problem,” Steele says.
But it’s also a more expensive, complex approach to doing research.
Novartis wooed Harvard Medical School professor Mark Fishman to head up their Cambridge facilities and to recruit fellow academics to join the Novartis labs—which, executives estimate, will employ about 1,000 people, all told.
A clinician who had worked at the molecular level, Fishman’s background is decidedly not pharmaceutical: he is best known for his research pioneering the use of zebrafish for understanding human diseases.
But Fishman’s ideas about research blend the barriers between scientific fields, and require collaboration between all kinds of different scientists, Steele says.
“There’s so much information out there,” Steele says, “no one can do this alone.”
In the Cambridge research facilities, Fishman said he wanted chemists working with molecular biologists, and signal pathway specialists—who understand what goes on inside a cell—working with the people who know how get a compound inside.
“Our mission is to discover medicines at an increasing pace and with even greater specificity, to better treat those now suffering disease,” Fishman wrote in a prepared statement for The Crimson, “and to improve the process so effectively over the coming years that our children look back with disbelief, surprised that such diseases were ever untreatable.”
Disco Science
For The Stubbins Associates, the architecture firm hired to turn Fishman’s vision of constant collaboration into a physical reality, the challenge was to create labs with “campfire” spaces that would force scientists to put down their beakers and talk to each other.
“I call it the sociology of science,” says Scott Simpson, one of the architects at Stubbins who designed the new lab space. “We have 15 to 20 different groups, and they all need to interrelate.”
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