Message from the board of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases

The fundamental role of the pharmaceutical industry is to discover, develop, produce and deliver innovative products to prevent and cure diseases, to ease suffering and to enhance the quality of life for patients worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), infectious diseases carry 10 percent of the global disease burden and cannot be neglected any longer.

The investment Novartis makes in the field of tropical disease research is an exception in an industry that has often neglected illnesses seen as endemic in the developing world. This research center is the first of its kind to focus solely on drug discovery for infectious diseases, using modern pharmaceutical research tools, including high-throughput screening and drug design using x-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). It also houses a state-of-the-art biosafety level 3 laboratory. One of our major hopes, beyond actually delivering drugs to the patients who need them, is that Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD) will become a model for solving the problem of access to medicine in poor countries. We hope that other companies will copy us, and that NITD will become a center of knowledge and education, helping people in the developing world learn how to continue to address these problems in their own countries.

Paul Herrling, Ph.D.
Head of Corporate Research, Novartis International AG and Chair of the Board of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases