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By John Miller
BASEL, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Visible from neighbouring Franceand Germany, a new 41-storey skyscraper that drugs company Roche opened near the river Rhine on Friday reaches 178meters into the sky, easily the tallest building in Switzerland.
The 550-million Swiss franc ($575 million) tower shows thatthe company retains its loyalty to the city of Basel where itwas founded in 1896.
It also sends a lofty message to cross-town rival Novartis and other drugmakers that Roche, the world's biggestcancer drug company, is determined to retain its leadership of the $100 billion-a-year oncology market, despite mountingcompetition.
"This new building can be seen as a defiant reaction to thearrival of others moving into a space Roche has dominated forthe last 15 years," said Michael Nawrath, an analyst at ZuercherKantonalbank.
Roche said its decision to erect "Building 1," as the toweris prosaically called, is motivated by a dearth of space at itsexisting Basel campus, rather than a desire to cast a shadow onNovartis.
Novartis became a more powerful rival in the treatment ofcancer this year after concluding a deal to buyGlaxoSmithKline's oncology business for $16 billion.
"We regard Building 1 as a clear commitment to Switzerlandand to Basel," said Roche CEO Severin Schwan of a structureconceived by the architecture firm, Herzog and de Meuron, thatcame up with the "Bird's Nest" stadium for the 2008 BeijingOlympics.
Building 1 will house about 2,000 workers.
Schwan, an Austrian who will retain his office in Roche'sthree-story headquarters down the street, already has an eventaller building, at 205 meters, in the works, due to be occupiedaround 2021.
Previously, Switzerland's tallest building was Zurich'sPrime Tower, at 126 meters.
Roche's new skyscraper comes at a time when other rivalsincluding Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck & Co are developing promising new therapies to harness the humanbody's immune system to attack cancer.
That's turf that Roche, with its pharmaceuticals anddiagnostics businesses, has laid claim to since it helped bringthe monoclonal antibodies Rituxan and Herceptin to the market inthe late 1990s.
While Roche has been touting trial results of itsinvestigational immunotherapy atezolizumab in shrinking tumoursin bladder cancer and certain lung cancers, Merck andBristol-Myers have similar drugs on the market. AstraZeneca, Pfizer and other drugmakers are also pursuingtheir own compounds.
Novartis wants a share of immuno-oncology, too.
"These agents allow your own body to work as a defenceagainst the cancer," Novartis Chief Executive Joe Jimenez saidin an interview on Friday on CNBC. "This is what's so excitingabout it."
Meanwhile, Novartis' Jimenez has building plans of his own.
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 Baselcampus.
Novartis is aiming for the clouds, too: three high-rises,each around 120 meters, are being planned for completion overthe next few years, according to a local newspaper.($1 = 0.9558 Swiss francs) (Reporting by John Miller in Zurich, Ruben Sprich in Basel;Editing by Keith Weir)
