The Swiss drugmaker said it was consulting with staff on plans to end manufacturing in Horsham and partially close global development operations.
Novartis currently employs 950 staff on the campus, with 330 dedicated to respiratory research. The restructuring is expected to result in the loss of some 500 positions, a spokesman said.
The move is the latest in a series of worldwide cutbacks by Novartis, which is seeking to streamline its business ahead of a wave of patent expiries on some of its biggest-selling medicines.
It comes at a bad time for British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government is already smarting from a decision by Pfizer to close its research and development center in Sandwich, southern England, which employs 2,400 people.
Sandwich is Pfizer’s biggest R&D facility in Europe and the largest R&D site of any foreign-owned drugmaker in Britain.
Both the Novartis and Pfizer moves will be implemented over the next two years.
Across the drugs industry, companies are consolidating their R&D activities as investors lose patience with the dismal returns made in recent years on the hunt for new medicines.
The cutbacks have taken an especially heavy toll in Britain, which punches above its weight in pharmaceuticals, and where the Royal Society of Chemistry estimates some 6,000 jobs have already disappeared in the last 12 months.
The country has also been hit in the past year by planned cuts at British-based drugmakers AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline.
