Jay Bradner, MD

Jay Bradner is President of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), the company’s innovation engine. He leads thousands of scientists at six research sites around the world in an effort to discover life-changing medicines for patients.

Jay was previously a clinician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. As an entrepreneur, he has co-founded five biotechnology startups. He has long been a proponent of open science, and when his lab at Dana-Farber discovered the bromodomain inhibitor JQ1, they took the unorthodox step of making it available to other researchers with no restrictions. The results have been shared with hundreds of labs worldwide, generating extensive data and fueling further open-source research.

Jay brought this same open approach when he joined Novartis in 2016. NIBR collaborates with an external network of academic and industry partners to facilitate cutting-edge science in areas of mutual interest. NIBR’s open science programs include the Global Scholars Program, which supports innovation through academic partnerships, and the annual Hackathon, which brings data scientists and NIBR researchers together to work on complex problems in the life sciences. 

For the past several years, Jay has also helped support patients outside of the lab, riding in the annual Pan-Mass Challenge, a long-distance cycling event that raises funds for Dana-Farber and honors the many patients who are bravely battling cancer.