Marty Lefkowitz: Listening creates opportunities.
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Speeding up drug developmentNew governance structurePublished on 20/09/2023
Boerje Haraldsson, a former scientist at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), had nowhere else to turn when he picked up the phone sometime in 2017 to ring his colleague Marty Lefkowitz to talk about an innovative molecule that could potentially be moved into clinical trials.
The reason he called Lefkowitz was that they were both nephrologists by training, and that Novartis had no kidney development unit at the time. “As kidney specialists, we knew each other from previous encounters,” Lefkowitz said. “And this was actually the key reason he called me to discuss his idea.”
It took little for Lefkowitz to grasp the importance of what Haraldsson had to offer – a new molecule that could interfere in parts of the immune system and that seemed potentially effective to treat kidney and other disorders.
Lefkowitz, who works in the clinical trial space on the Novartis Campus in East Hanover, traveled to Basel to discuss the idea with Haraldsson and the team of scientists who had been working on the molecule for the past few years.
“After the meeting in Basel, I presented the project to my colleagues within the Global Drug Development (GDD) unit, who embraced the idea relatively quickly, both for its scientific and medical value,” Lefkowitz said. “It was sort of a catalyst for a new way of collaboration.”
Setting up a new structure
The chat between the two nephrologists not only prompted Novartis to start a new project in the kidney disease arena. Their discussion also had wider repercussions as the company started to build new interfaces to help discovery and development teams better align and collaborate more intensively.
Up until this moment, most research within NIBR had been primarily focused on the discovery side of pharmaceutical science, with less guidance on preparing for the many subsequent steps that are needed to successfully bring a new molecule to the clinic and usher through the complex development and commercial process.
But thanks to the initial connection established by Lefkowitz and Haraldsson, an open conversation started to evolve between the two groups. This made it possible to incorporate studies into NIBR’s discovery and translational medicine work, which helped advance the development of the drug and move it more quickly to the clinic.
To this end, Novartis built, among others, what is today known as a Global Program Team – a cross-divisional team with NIBR representation led by a Global Program Head within GDD that manages the strategy and execution of a program.
