Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, discusses historical clinical trial attrition rates across the pharmaceutical industry during an interview on the a16z Podcast.
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…”
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.”