Interestingly, Dave Brennan makes this assertion while speaking in China, where the drugmaker announced the opening of its first clinical pharmacology unit in that country. But the ceo insists there are no plans to shift operations out of India in response to the recent patent ruling against Novartis.

That decision, which involved patent protection for the Gleevec cancer med, prompted Novartis ceo Dan Vasella to say investment in India would be slashed, although he insisted the move wasn’t punishment.

“I think that will set some tone for how people operate, but it hasn’t caused us to go back and take a major shift of our operations there,” Brennan tells Reuters. “I think over time that they’ll continue to get challenged on it a bit, but it hasn’t caused us to say we’re going to do anything differently…We’ve got a longer-term view of what China can be that we started investing in a few years ago, so India’s not there yet.”

Earlier this year, AstraZeneca announced a $15 million investment in a new R&D facility in India, which would join an existing center for TB drug discovery that opened five years ago.