TheChek News Flow

Sunday: 

Joe Jimenez: Yes, for about a month.

As I hear from our Sandoz people, they currently sell an above-average number of anti-infectives: the cold and flu wave could become quite violent this winter.

I go to the gym two or three times a week, lift weights and train on the treadmill. I also swim regularly.

No. We have found that we have to be the number one or two in order to be successful in the long run. This was not the case in the vaccine division. Together with Glaxo Smith Kline, the business is now the right size.

Under Daniel Vasella (63) Novartis had a plurality of independent divisions.Today, the Group is fully integrated. This increases the risks.

The opposite is the case. We used to have many divisions that were too small like the vaccine business or animal medicine. They were much more exposed to external influences. Today we are more focused. All businesses have a global reach and are top of their range. This gives us stability.

In production, from 2020 onwards, we will save one billion dollars a year. The internal services , we want to keep costs stable, even if the group is growing. This allows us to improve margins by several percentage points over time.

We do not degrade, but we move some places to countries with lower costs. We have service centers in Mexico, Prague , Dublin , Kuala Lumpur and Hyderabad.

Yes. At the same time, we are creating some new jobs in Basel. We move the head office of the oncology unit here. Biotherapeutic research is concentrated in Basel and Cambridge. This also creates new jobs in Switzerland.

Glivec is losing this year's patent protection in the US, next year in Europe. The successors are ready and come from Novartis research. On the one hand, for example, the cosmetics drug Cosentyx, which was developed in Basel and generated sales of more than one billion dollars in the first year. The second important drug is Entresto, which reduces deaths and cardiac heart failure by 20 percent each.

But quite satisfied you can not be. Novartis is not present in the immunotherapies that revolutionize the treatment of cancer.

Our people first wanted to understand how the new drugs worked. So we were a little late. The others also did not understand the mechanism, but they were faster in the development of this particular medicine. In the next wave of medications, however, we will be there. We have twelve drugs tested in 27 trials.

I believe that life expectancy will dramatically increase over the next 20 years.

The technology! We have a platform for regenerative medicine. We research how to regenerate muscles, vision and hearing as well as cartilage.

For example, the muscles: from the age of 50 onwards they do not regenerate themselves. We try to reverse this effect. The same when listening. With age you lose your hearing ability. We are trying to reverse this with a gene therapy: the stem cells are to be stimulated, so that they multiply hearing cells. It works with animals. In humans, we just test it.

I do not want to commit myself. But if we start from a life expectancy of the beginning of 80 as today, I would say: substantially longer.

Probably! The age of retirement will probably increase.

In the case of all progress, there are also frequent setbacks. Her competitor Eli Lilly just failed with an Alzheimer's drug. Novartis has a similar project.

We follow a different approach than Eli Lilly. We believe that Alzheimer's can be best treated by slowing down the disease at a time or even stopping it before the symptoms have started. We therefore identify patients with a genetic mutation that favors the onset of Alzheimer's disease. This is a very long-term experiment.It can take up to ten years for us to have reliable results.

Disappointing is the development of the Ophthalmic Alcon. The $ 51 billion that Novartis paid for made Alcon the most expensive deal for a Swiss company. Today the company is for sale.

We are fully focused on the turnaround of our business. When we took over Alcon in 2010, the company was very successful. We left her on the long line. By 2014 this worked very well, but then the innovations broke off. Today it is clear that we should have intervened earlier and more resolutely. We are disappointed that the turnaround takes so long. But I am convinced that the new management creates it. As far as the future of the business is concerned, we leave all options open.

I have one here. Do you want to see them?

Clear. But we should call our photographer.

Sorry, but that does not work. The lens is a prototype (Jimenez brings a lens, which he passes around. She looks quite normal, but has a kind of sensor in the interior) . This is the prototype of an adaptive contact lens. It allows to focus when looking in the distance or looking down and reading newspaper. These lenses will bring a great breakthrough. The technology behind it is very complex.

We do not know that, yet. Together with Google Verily, we will find a way to produce efficiently.

We have repeatedly said that we are focusing on complementary acquisitions within the range of two to five billion US dollars.

No, we still observe his health priorities. He's not in office yet.

Well, in the US less investment has been made in recent years. Probably because of the high corporate taxes. If these are now lowered, as is indicated, this is certainly positive.