Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical group, is to switch hundreds of millions of dollars in planned investments from India in the next few years in response to a court ruling that weakens intellectual property rights on new medicines.

In his first detailed comments on the rejection earlier this month of his attempt to protect the patent on the company’s cancer medicine Glivec, Daniel Vasella, chief executive of Novartis, told the Financial Times that his “concrete plans” for investments in research in India stalled during the trial and would now go elsewhere instead.