On the shoulders of crowds

Published on 18/08/2022

In his letter to Robert Hooke in 1675, Isaac Newton famously wrote that “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The sentence has come to mean many things over the past four centuries, but most importantly it was understood to reflect the idea that science is an iterative group endeavor in which one breakthrough rests on a myriad of preceding steps.

But despite Newton’s adage, the genius myth of the lone thinker was kept alive through the ages, epitomized by outstanding figures such as Albert Einstein and, of course, Newton himself. Even to this day, Nobel Prizes for breakthrough achievements in chemistry, medicine and physics, for example, are won in groups of three, reflecting excellence at the individual level.

However, this exclusive focus on a few outstanding researchers seems less justified today than in the past, when most scientific findings were indeed published by single authors who could claim that they worked on their own. The reality of science looks much different today. Research papers now usually list dozens of contributors as co-authors, while in some cases more than 1000 researchers are named. The record so far is 5154 authors for a single paper.

Such “big science” efforts, as they are sometimes called, have the advantage of bringing the best researchers together and helping to create ecosystems that are bigger than the sum of their parts. Examples of such concerted action include the European Union’s long-term research program, which in 2021 started its latest iteration under the name Horizon Europe with funding worth 95.5 billion euros. Another well-known big-science operation is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. For decades, the organization pooled the world’s best physicists to shed light on fundamental aspects of the universe, which, among other things, led to the discovery of the “God particle,” more mundanely known as the Higgs boson.

In the realm of medicine, the Human Genome Project is a prominent example. The multi-year endeavor, which led to the decoding of the human genome in 2003, not only helped shed light on the hidden structure of human biology, but was instrumental in developing tools and techniques which have led to the rise in gene therapy.

Also, the fight against the coronavirus pandemic showed the advantage of collaboration. The record speed in the development of new vaccines and medicines against COVID-19 would have been unthinkable without large-scale investments in novel technologies, such as mRNA, which have been the fruit of decades-long research. Thanks to these efforts, mRNA could now not only be used for the treatment of infectious diseases, but offer researchers new ways to treat conditions such as cancer.

Collaborate to innovate

Novartis, for its part, embraced collaboration early on as a means of driving innovation. Its predecessor companies had already been spearheading collaborative networks, extending their reach both to industry peers and to academia. One of the earliest such projects was set up in 1918 when Sandoz, Ciba and Geigy – then still working in the dyestuffs business – created the IG Basel syndicate, combining their resources to fend off increasing competition from the United States and Germany.

Novartis predecessor companies also established strong ties with academia, especially in the early part of the 20th century, when they started to expand into the pharmaceuticals business. Sandoz, for example, hired Arthur Stoll from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich to lead its fledgling pharma business, while Ciba collaborated with leading university scientists such as Nobel Prize winners Leopold Ruzicka and Tadeus Reichstein in the area of hormone science.

In 1970, Novartis predecessor companies Ciba and Geigy went one step further by founding the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, or FMI, to better connect corporate and academic research efforts and boost innovation to stay ahead of the competition. Likewise, the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research has entertained hundreds of research partnerships with leading institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which were instrumental in the development of innovative medicines.

Fresh wave of collaboration

Since these early days, cooperation with other companies and research institutes has accelerated. This is also because in today’s highly specialized and fast-evolving world of science even large companies such as Novartis, with its more than 20000 scientists in research and development, need to partner with external groups to create synergies and benefit from skills and insights that are otherwise not available.

Against this background, Novartis has not only looked for partnerships with industry peers in the pharmaceutical and biotech space and pursued takeovers to build research platforms in areas such as gene therapy and nuclear medicine. It has also forged connections with industry leaders from other domains, especially in the realm of data and digital, an area in which it had little to no in-house expertise until recently.

This fast-paced rhythm of scientific progress has in fact changed so fundamentally of late that Novartis decided in 2019 it would open its research campus in Basel to third parties. Back then, Novartis Chairman Joerg Reinhardt explained the move as follows: “Today, we stand at another major crossroads. The world in which we are living is changing fast. New social, economic and technological forces are prompting us to reconsider the way we organize our work, interact with others and how we use our natural resources in the most efficient manner.”

He especially focused on the importance of collaboration. “Collaboration is becoming increasingly important in this environment in which we need to work much more closely with our technology partners to help us harness emerging possibilities in areas such as data and digital, gene therapy or 3D printing, to name but a few high-tech domains. Together with leaders from other sectors, we will be better equipped to understand these new technologies to help us develop and deliver breakthrough medicines,” Reinhardt said.

Since the announcement, Novartis has attracted a flurry of digital startups on its Basel Campus as well as several biotech companies such as FoRx Therapeutics. Soon, the Friedrich Miescher Institute and the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel will open shop on campus and interact more intensively with researchers here.

Importance of healthy ecosystems

While collaboration remains a key driver in the attempt of Novartis to push innovation, the company is also acutely aware that without a healthy ecosystem with leading universities and research facilities, as well as a strong network of suppliers and service companies, it will struggle to reach peak performance.

This is self-evident. To build a successful business as well as strong research activities, science-based companies need to operate in an environment that is conducive to reaching their goals. This also includes laws and regulation that promote science and innovation, protect intellectual property rights, and provide companies with easy access to markets and talents.

The ecosystem argument was also crucial when Novartis built its research headquarters in Cambridge in 2001, as it aimed to tap into the region’s large pool of talented medical scientists. And the same logic prompted Novartis to start building its research campus in Basel, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create modern workspaces and top-notch labs to attract the best scientists from around the world.

From a research perspective, both the United States and Switzerland have provided Novartis with the environment it needs to remain innovative, since both countries invest large sums in science. With investments north of 650 billion dollars in 2019, the United States remains the highest spender worldwide in terms of research and development. And Switzerland, despite its limited size, is ranked 18th according to data compiled by the OECD, with annual spending of more than 18 billion dollars.

Novartis has also undertaken steps towards strengthening these ecosystems itself, especially in Switzerland, where the company has its historic roots and global headquarters. It has recently helped found the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology together with the University of Basel and the local University Hospital and created the startup platform FreeNovation to help strengthen basic research in Switzerland in areas which otherwise lack funds or attract only limited funding.

That investing in such an ecosystem is vital goes without saying, especially given the long development times in pharmaceutical research. On average, it takes more than 10 years and investments in excess of 1 billion US dollars to develop a new compound.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. In order to develop novel medicines, decades of basic research are required before pharmaceutical scientists can actually start working on new therapies. In the case of gene therapy, for example, it took several decades of fundamental research before the first therapies were developed out of what in the 1970s was still called gene surgery.

Including stakeholders

Being part of and nurturing such research networks is vital for both small and large research organizations given the large pool of more than 8 million scientists worldwide.

To tap into this huge knowledge reservoir, Novartis, for example, is also a member of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private partnership, which unites the European Union and European pharmaceutical industry, as well as universities, research centers, patient organizations and regulators. The IMI not only combines much-needed expertise from different science groups, but also brings other stakeholders to the table, an element which is becoming increasingly important to develop more holistic solutions in the realm of medicine or technology.

As such, collaboration is set to accelerate in the years ahead even though geopolitical and economic challenges are making such ties more difficult to maintain, including Switzerland’s current loss of full access to Europe’s flagship program Horizon Europe. But despite these challenges, Novartis remains dedicated to collaboration and is set to expand its own network beyond the realm of pure science by accelerating ties to patient organizations, NGOs in the access space and environmental specialists, to name but a few.

The idea of broadening the spectrum of science contributors is also gaining pace elsewhere. A 2021 special issue of Nature looked at the importance of collaboration as well as the inclusion of stakeholder groups in research. The conclusion in Nature was as follows: “The metaphor ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ has been much overused by scientists past and present. Today, such ‘giants’ are not only the investigators named on papers and project grants, but also every other participant in the research process. The future lies in standing on the shoulders of crowds.”