Vas Narasimhan
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Vas Narasimhan reads as The Visionary because he arrived at Novartis declaring an ambition to reimagine medicine through data science and artificial intelligence when most pharmaceutical leaders still treated the language with caution. He has backed that conviction with structural commitment, pursuing cell and gene therapy, radioligand treatment, and AI-driven drug discovery, and reorganising the company around those bets.
“That is something that's a heavy interest of the field and also at our company. We actually just got great data on a breast cancer drug, which can be given to women who have had their breast cancer resected, but then to prevent it recurring.”
“Roughly, that's how it works, and it's a long journey. First thing we have to do is we have to discover or find what we call a target in the human body that we want a drug. We think this target has some ability to impact human health in a disease we're interested in. Then we have to design a drug to either inhibit or promote that target.”
“On DEI, we're on a good track here. We've actually about 48% women in management, median pay for women and no artists is higher than for men. So we have more work to do at the upper levels of the company, but we're overall doing really well, I think.”
“They were. They actually, you know, my father was alongside his brothers, were some of the first people in our family to go to college in India. Father did his PhD in India, was able to work his way up, and then was one of the first people to come to the United States. My mother came to Carnegie Mellon.”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Vas Narasimhan”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE