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, infectious diseases carry 10 percent of the global disease burden and cannot afford to be neglected any longer.
 

Novartis' investment in the field of tropical disease research is an exception in an industry that has traditionally 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 NMR. It will also house 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 the NITD will become a model for solving the problem of access to medicine for poor countries. We hope that other companies will copy us, and that the 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 counties.
 

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