Global Discovery Chemistry is at the center of drug discovery research at Novartis.
 

Our experimental and computational chemists focus on the design and synthesis of potential drug molecules. Spanning across disciplines, they work in teams to study these molecules and select those that have the greatest potential to help patients. Our chemists are encouraged to take risks and experiment with new approaches to drug discovery, while continuing to evolve traditional approaches.

Global Discovery Chemistry consists of the following three components:

Disease Area Chemistry
Disease area chemistry units work in close collaboration with the Novartis Disease Areas (DA). There are chemistry units for each of the following DAs: Autoimmunity & Transplantation, Musculoskeletal, Cardiovascular, Diabetes, Infectious Diseases, Neuroscience, Oncology and Respiratory Diseases. These units are fully integrated with the DA biology groups, and are accountable for projects from earliest stages to drug candidate nominations.

Lead Synthesis and Chemogenetics (LSC)
LSC has three major functions: hit finding library synthesis, hit-to-lead chemistry, and chemogenetics. The hit finding effort, located in Basel, involves the synthesis of large diversity oriented and targeted libraries for high-throughput screening. In addition, this unit also contains a center of excellence in fragment-based synthesis. The hit-to-lead effort, located in both Basel and Cambridge, collaborates closely with the DA chemistry units. Scientists in this area exploit parallel array synthesis and automated purification techniques to accelerate the lead identification process. The chemogenetics effort, based in Cambridge, is focused on exploiting chemical approaches to target identification. This group works closely with the Molecular and Developmental Pathways unit as well as with the alliance partner Cellzome.

Computer-Aided Molecular Modeling (CAMM)
CAMM is a global center of excellence for computational chemistry for drug design and optimization. This group is involved in ligand-based and structure-based design, combinatorial library design, cheminformatics, and ADME/toxicology predictions. This group is located at all research sites, and collaborates closely with biologists and chemists in the DAs and LSC.

Global Discovery Chemistry is composed of the combinatorial, medicinal and computational chemistry functions across the NIBR sites in Basel, Cambridge, Vienna and Horsham. The current organization consists of over 500 chemists worldwide and is headed by Dr. Scott Biller, who is based in Cambridge.

2004:
 

Liu L, Wong TP, Pozza MF, et al.  Role of NMDA Receptor Subtypes in Governing the Direction of Hippocampal Synaptic Plasticity.  Science 304: 1021-1024 (2004).
 

Thoma G, Nuninger F, Schaefer M, et al.  Orally Bioavailable Competitive CCR5 Antagonists. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry; 47(8):1939-55 (2004).
 

Willis MC, Powell LHW, Claverie CK, et al.  Enantioselective Suzuki reactions: catalytic asymmetric synthesis of compounds containing quaternary carbon centers. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl; 43(10):1249-1251 (2004).
 

Nussbaumer P, Billich A.  Steroid sulfatase inhibitors. Med Res Rev 24(4): 529-576 (2004).
 

Ettmayer P, Amidon G, Clement B, et al.  Lessons learned from marketed and investigational prodrugs. J Med Chem; 47(10):  2393-2404 (2004). 
 

Manley PW, Guido B, Brüggen J, et al.   Advances in the Structural Biology, Design, and Clinical Development of VEGF-R Kinase Inhibitors for the Treatment of Angiogenesis.  Biochim. Biophys.  Acta;  1697: 17-27 (2004).