Welcome to Pharmaceutical Executive Daily, your quick briefing on the top news shaping the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
Novartis plans to lay off 322 employees from its East Hanover, New Jersey location beginning October 2 of this year, according to notices the company filed with the state. The cuts follow an earlier round of filings in May disclosing 76 job reductions at the same site. The filings do not specify which positions or business units will be affected, and Novartis has not publicly explained the rationale for the reductions. The news comes despite a string of recent positive developments for the company—including the acquisition of Myricx Bio for at least $1.1 billion in upfront payments, plus an additional $400 million in potential milestones, bringing Myricx's NMTi payload platform into Novartis' pipeline, and the European Commission's approval of Itvisma for spinal muscular atrophy in children two years and older, teens, and adults.
Next, Evogene announced a strategic joint initiative with the Blavatnik Center for Drug Discovery at Tel Aviv University, aimed at accelerating small-molecule drug discovery within Israel's academic research ecosystem. Evogene is a computational chemistry company that applies AI to the generative design of small molecules in both the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors. The partnership will combine Evogene's ChemPass AI platform with the Blavatnik Center's experimental validation capabilities, with a particular focus on challenging biology such as complex proteins and molecular glue-oriented targets—areas where traditional discovery approaches have historically struggled. The collaboration builds on Evogene's broader AI momentum, including a milestone announced in June with Google Cloud, in which the two companies successfully integrated agentic computational systems into the ChemPass AI platform—a step the company says moves it closer to autonomous small-molecule discovery and optimization.
Finally, Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with Emmanuel Frenehard, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Sanofi, on what he calls "AI as reinvention"—and why the distinction between automating existing workflows and fundamentally reimagining them is the difference between incremental improvement and genuine transformation. Frenehard details Sanofi's three-tiered AI strategy—snackable, specialized, and generative—and the company's effort to embed AI across research, clinical development, manufacturing, commercial operations, and the employee experience. A central theme is the importance of concentrated investment over scattered pilots: Frenehard argues that workforce upskilling, focused bets, and deep organizational commitment are what separate companies that are successfully scaling AI from those that are not. On governance, Frenehard emphasizes Sanofi's AI oversight board and human-in-the-loop approach, noting that "AI without governance runs the risk of becoming chaos."
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