Assertion Not checkable as stated
AI outperforms internal human analysts at forecasting Novartis product sales
“The other area, interestingly, in the financial area as well, we find that AI does a great job predicting our free cashflow, predicting a lot of our sales for key products, and it does better than our internal people because it doesn't have the biases and the …”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jan 2039
Viable animal-to-human organ xenotransplantation will arrive within 10 to 20 years
“I think a couple of things will likely come. I think xenotransplantation, I mean, which has been in and out and worked on. And what's interesting is every one of these comes up and down. So, you know, gene therapies, cell therapies popped up in the nineties, k…”
Opinion
AI in digital health currently offers very little actual impact
“Well, I have to first say, I completely agree about the hype cycle here. I mean, as we've gotten quite scaled and working on digital health and data science, we've learned that there's a lot of talk and very little in terms of actual delivery of impact.”
Opinion
Real-world evidence cannot replace randomized blinded clinical trials
“The other thing people talk about, but I mean, I'll take a skeptical voice around it, is the ability to use real world evidence to try to get at these things. But as somebody who's worked in clinical trials for most of their time in, in the industry I do belie…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wearable sensors have failed to meet clinical trial validation standards
“When I think about, first of all, I would say just in general in sensors is another place where there's been a lot of hype Above what, of expectations. I mean, we've been really trying to explore the use of sensors in clinical trials now for, in my own experie…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pharma clinical trial success rates have stayed flat at 5 percent
“And actually, when you look at attrition rates in our industry, really the chances of success that we have, they haven't moved in the last 15 years. Still, when we bring a medicine into human beings, on average, only one out of 20 works.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Novartis will only advance drugs that replace the standard of care
“We internally have just set a very clear bar now for ourselves, primarily because we live in a world now where nobody wants a me too medicine or a medicine that's just incrementally better. We say to ourselves, it has to replace the standard of care.”
Assertion Supported
Novartis launched first FDA-approved prescription app for opioid addiction
“I mean, one example we launched in the U S a digital medicine. I mean, with paratherapeutics, this is the first digital app with an FDA label that's being used for opioid addiction and other psychiatric illnesses. And it is literally an app That has run clinic…”
Opinion
Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan: Software is a drug
“Software is a drug.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narasimhan: CAR-T therapy development will shift to an iterative model
“I think in the specific example of car T I do think that's, what's going to happen because you have such a complex manufacturing that you're going to have the first generation, let's say of a CD-nineteen card, which is a cart that targets B cell cancers. And y…”
Insight
Narasimhan: AAV vectors enable reusable platform delivery in gene therapy
“When you think about AAV vectors, these are ways to deliver these gene therapies into the body. Once you solve it, the process, let's say for one of these vectors, you can apply it to multiple different diseases and not have to Recreate everything again. That'…”
Disclosure
Novartis spent years just cleaning healthcare data before running AI algorithms
“We've had to spend most of the time just cleaning the data sets before you can even run the algorithm. That's just taken us years just to clean the data sets. And I think people underestimate how little clean data there is out there and how hard it is”
Disclosure
Unstructured machine learning on clinical data lakes has failed to yield insights
“I mean, I think the holy grail of kind of having unstructured machine learning Go into big clinical data lakes and then suddenly find new insights. We've not been able to crack mostly because the data to link it up.”
Disclosure
Novartis executed $50 billion in deals in 2018
“We transacted in 2018 around fifty billion dollars of deals to really change the shape of the company.”
Insight
Rebuilding an abandoned pharmaceutical R&D division takes 10 years
“Because you can't change your mind now, you know, in three or four years and say, I wish I had it back. It'll take you another 10 years to build it back up again.”
Disclosure
Narasimhan: Novartis averages an 8% to 10% clinical trial success rate
“We've actually been fortunate at our company. We average in that same metric about eight to 10%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narasimhan: Scaling technology in clinical trials could cut costs by 20%
“There are estimates now from various sources that believe you could take out 20% of clinical trials costs if you were to actually to really deploy technology at scale.”
Disclosure
Narasimhan: Novartis considers drug reimbursement early in development, not at launch
“It used to be, we think about reimbursement as we got to launch. Now we're thinking about it really early in development.”
Assertion Partly supported
Novartis spent $15 billion on gene therapy acquisitions in 2018
“We've done fifteen billion dollars of acquisitions just last year in the space, not, not including all of our internal work in each of these areas.”
Disclosure
Novartis CEO: Novartis previously ran an internal aging program targeting sarcopenia
“You know, we had actually an aging program, a small aging program for some time where we were trying to work on things like sarcopenia, which is muscle wasting and similar, similar kinds of conditions. It turns out to be very, very difficult to, because again,…”
Assertion Contradicted
Narasimhan: RNA therapies are the only way to drug LP(a)
“And so the only way to really target it turns out to be using RNA based therapies. These RNA based therapies are able to block the production of the gene translation of the gene into the protein and then actually reduce the LP little a in the blood.”
Disclosure
Novartis built AI command center Sense to track global clinical trials
“So we've built an operational command center. Take us, as I said, two and a half years to build it. We call it sense. And what it enables us to do a team sitting centrally in our headquarters to look at all of our clinical trials in the world. And AI is predic…”
Assertion Supported
Novartis employs 17,000 R&D staff and spends $9B+ annually
“We have 17,000 R&D people and spend nine, nine billion dollars plus a year in, in R&D.”
Insight
Narasimhan: Novartis R&D pipeline is a zero-sum game
“Because if you take another program on, that means that there's another program you have to stop. I mean, it's a zero sum game for us.”
Vas Narasimhan