Straight talk with...Ricardo Dolmetsch

Abstract

Neuroscience, in recent years, has started to look like a graveyard for drug development, with many large pharmaceutical companies either eliminating their brain disorder programs or cutting back heavily on such research. Novartis seemed to have made exactly this kind of drastic change two years ago when the company announced plans to shutter its neuroscience operations at its global headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. But the company made it known then that its intention was to ultimately set up a new neuroscience division at the company's US base in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Credit: PJ Kaszas, NIBR

The US site was initially picked to take advantage of the local academic strength in the field of psychiatric genetics. Now, it seems that Novartis is also looking to add stem cell technologies to the mix with the appointment in August of Ricardo Dolmetsch as the company's global head of neurosciences—the first new hire for the company's reincarnated division. As a professor at California's Stanford University School of Medicine for the past ten years, Dolmetsch made his name using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to study a rare form of autism known as Timothy syndrome. Elie Dolgin met with Dolmetsch at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in the Technology Square area of Cambridge to discuss how he plans to succeed where so many others have failed.