Novartis

Novartis products include oncology medicines, generic and biosimilar medicines and eye care devices. The Innovative Medicine segment of the company is divided into Novartis Oncology and Novartis Pharmaceuticals. Novartis Pharmaceuticals consists of global business franchises in ophthalmology, neuroscience, immunology and dermatology, respiratory, cardio-metabolic and established medicines.

Novartis Oncology is focused on the development and manufacturing of medicines directed towards improving and extending people's lives.

Sandoz is a division of Novartis that manufactures, distributes and sells prescription medicines and pharmaceutical active substances that are not patent protected and is franchised into Retail generics, Anti-Infectives and Biopharmaceuticals.

Alcon is a division of Novartis in the eye car product field in eye care devices and vision care. Alcon’s surgical franchise includes technologies and devices for cataract, retinal, glaucoma and refractive surgery and intraocular lenses to treat cataracts and refractive errors. Alcon’s Vision Care franchise includes contact lenses and contact lens care products. Alcon’s surgical portfolio also includes equipment for performing cataract surgery.

Previously known as AveXis, Novartis Gene Therapies works to develop and commercialize gene therapies. They have a specific focus on neurological genetic diseases. Their initial gene therapy is for spinal muscular atrophy and has been approved in the United States, Japan, the European Union, and Brazil.

Part of their research and development program, the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) is working on developing informatics tools for drug discovery with a focus on open-sourced software.

Habitat is a software developed to be a self-contained object storage management system. Based on Amazon Web Services, Novartis says Habitat is capable of virtually unlimited storage and can be used as a local repository for a single application or shared and used with many clients.

Novartis says Yet Another Data Abstraction (YADA) is a data aggregation tool capable of accessing data sets at any data source in any format and from any environment with a single URL and a single configuration. YADA is intended to be a lightweight framework for data retrieval, searching, storage, and manipulation.

OntoBrowser is a web-based application for managing ontologies. Developed by Novartis, they say the tool is intended to provide an online collaborative solution for curators to map code list terms to preferred ontology terms. OntoBrowser also offers visualization of ontologies in hierarchical or graph format, advanced search capabilities, and web service access to data.

Railroadtracks is a Python package Novartis says is intended to handle connected computation steps for DNA and RNA sequencing.

Yet Another Pipeline (YAP) is an extensible parallel framework developed by Novartis and written in Python using OpenMPI libraries. The software is intended to help researchers build high throughput data pipelines without knowledge of parallel programming.

Developed by Novartis, the RDKit is a collection of cheminformatics and machine-learning softwre written in C++ and Python. The distribution includes a PostgreSQL-based cartridge allowing molecules to be stored in a relational database and allowing users to retrieve information via substructure and similarity searches.

GridVar is a JQuery plugin that visualized multi-dimensional datasets as layers organized in a row-column format. Novartis says the software is intended to allow users to visualize data as a background color and enables characteristics of a dataset to be layered on top of each other.

Developed by Novartis to use big data and data analytics, Nerve Live is an advanced analytics platform is intended to be used as part of a drug discovery program. Novartis sees the platform as enabling machine learning and cognitive computing systems to extract information which traditional data analysts and users might miss.

The Nerve Live was developed by first building a data lake. This was followed by developing an analytics engine to process the data and derive assets from it. And the final stage of development of this program involved designing user modules that would make predictive analytic insights and offer these insights to add value in business decisions.

Novartis hopes to develop Nerve Live to offer features to help manage resources, including using predictive models to plan medical supplies for medical centers.

The data42 program is a digital research and development platform Novartis believes will help in drug discovery and drug testing while costing less. The program would include large pools of patient and pharmaceutical data and an artificial intelligence to assist researchers in their development. As of March 2020, the program was still in the initial phases of development.

Novartis, previously called Ciba-Geigy, was one of the few pharmaceutical companies involved in tyrosine kinase inhibitor research when it began a collaboration with oncologist Brian Druker which resulted in discovery of the kinase inhibitor drug Gleevec (also known as Glivec or imatinib). Gleevec was FDA approved in 2001 to treat patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Kinases perform phosphorylation, a mechanism that controls the activity of proteins in the cell. CML patients have a mutation causing their tyrosine kinase to be overactive, which signals cell to proliferate at a high rate, resulting in accumulation of immature white blood cells. Based on revenue, Gleevec was one of Novartis’s top ten pharmaceutical products in 2017.

Novartis Oncology drug Kisqali (ribociclib) in Phase III MONALEESA (Mammary Oncology Assessment of LEE011’s (Ribociclib’s) Efficacy and Safety) trials, was reported in December 2018 to demonstrate efficacy and tolerability in combination with endocrine therapy in advanced breast cancer patients with visceral involvement. Kisqali (ribociclib) is a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor that inhibits cyclin-dependent kinase 4 and 6 (CDK4/6), proteins that when over active can promote cancer cell division and cancer growth. The drug is an orally available small molecule that acts by blocking phosphorylation of the retinoblastoma protein, which prevents cell-cycle progression. Kisqali is also in the NATALEE study, a Phase III clinical trial with endocrine therapy to treat early breast cancer.

ZOLGENSMA® (onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi) is a gene therapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for children less than 2 years old with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).

ZOLGENSMA is given as a one-time infusion into a vein.

ZOLGENSMA was not evaluated in patients with advanced SMA.