<div>Visible from neighbouring France and Germany, a new 41-storey skyscraper that drugs company Roche opened near the river Rhine on Friday reaches 178 meters into the sky, easily the tallest building in Switzerland.</div><div> </div><div>The 550-million Swiss franc ($575 million) tower shows that the company retains its loyalty to the city of Basel where it was founded in 1896.</div><div> </div><div>It also sends a lofty message to cross-town rival Novartis and other drugmakers that Roche, the world's biggest cancer drug company, is determined to retain its leadership of the $100 billion-a-year oncology market, despite mounting competition.</div><div> </div><div>"This new building can be seen as a defiant reaction to the arrival of others moving into a space Roche has dominated for the last 15 years," said Michael Nawrath, an analyst at Zuercher Kantonalbank.</div><div> </div><div>Roche said its decision to erect "Building 1," as the tower is prosaically called, is motivated by a dearth of space at its existing Basel campus, rather than a desire to cast a shadow on Novartis.</div><div> </div><div>Novartis became a more powerful rival in the treatment of cancer this year after concluding a deal to buy GlaxoSmithKline's oncology business for $16 billion.</div><div> </div><div>"We regard Building 1 as a clear commitment to Switzerland and to Basel," said Roche CEO Severin Schwan of a structure conceived by the architecture firm, Herzog and de Meuron, that came up with the "Bird's Nest" stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.</div><div> </div><div>Building 1 will house about 2,000 workers.</div><div> </div><div>Schwan, an Austrian who will retain his office in Roche's three-story headquarters down the street, already has an even taller building, at 205 meters, in the works, due to be occupied around 2021.</div><div> </div><div>Previously, Switzerland's tallest building was Zurich's Prime Tower, at 126 meters.</div><div> </div><div>Roche's new skyscraper comes at a time when other rivals including Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck & Co are developing promising new therapies to harness the human body's immune system to attack cancer.</div><div> </div><div>That's turf that Roche, with its pharmaceuticals and diagnostics businesses, has laid claim to since it helped bring the monoclonal antibodies Rituxan and Herceptin to the market in the late 1990s.</div><div> </div><div>While Roche has been touting trial results of its investigational immunotherapy atezolizumab in shrinking tumours in bladder cancer and certain lung cancers, Merck and Bristol-Myers have similar drugs on the market. AstraZeneca , Pfizer and other drugmakers are also pursuing their own compounds.</div><div> </div><div>Novartis wants a share of immuno-oncology, too.</div><div> </div><div>"These agents allow your own body to work as a defence against the cancer," Novartis Chief Executive Joe Jimenez said in an interview on Friday on CNBC. "This is what's so exciting about it."</div><div> </div><div>Meanwhile, Novartis' Jimenez has building plans of his own.</div><div> </div><div>The company has enlisted star architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, among others, as part of its multi-billion-dollar reshaping of its Basel campus.</div><div> </div><div>Novartis is aiming for the clouds, too: three high-rises, each around 120 meters, are being planned for completion over the next few years, according to a local newspaper.</div><div> </div><div>(Reuters)</div>
