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Vas Narasimhan

lines on the record: 29
first: 2024-03-07
most recent: 2024-03-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, I have to say, I mean, when I look at the reach of our medicines and the impact they have, I'll just go back to my time with Paul Farmer just to say that who unfortunately passed away but was an incredible mentor and inspiring mentor. I always told him I wanted to have this big impact on public health. He, of course, did it working with patients in some of the poorest communities in the world. Today, Novartis, our malaria drug, coartam. Coartem is almost 99% effective when it's given on time to treat a malaria patient. Over 400 million children treated with our malaria medicines. And the biggest malaria pipeline. So even from a public health standpoint, the opportunity to have an impact at scale has really been fulfilled with this role.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do, we've signed up for a 5% plus growth, 40% plus margins and very consistent growth over time. I think the reason to invest in the sector is the science. I mean, when you look again, if I go back into the history, for most of the last century, we were only giving people pills and small molecule drugs. Then we discovered that we had this whole world of biologics and we could treat diseases with biologicals. More recently, we've discovered that we can reprogram your cells. We can edit the genome. We can use these RNA therapeutics to completely transform areas of medicine. Those technology areas are at their very nascent stage. And what we're going to find is they're going to open up whole new areas of growth from our business standpoint and a human health impact standpoint. And so to get in now as that's happening. And you've seen now the obesity companies have cleared 500 billion market cap.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would think hard about it. At the moment, it would feel like a really daunting task given the politics. But on the flip side, I do think public service, of course, has so much power. And I think if you're in the right context, you could do a lot of good for the world. But I think it's very context dependent. As you know, it can be a very short time in some of these roles with some of the recent cabinet members.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, despite some of the things people have, concepts people have about our industry, in the end, what we do is we create these miracles that fit in the palm of your hand, these little medicines that can transform a human being's life. And if you look at the arc of history, in the last 130 years, we've been able to move through the power of medicine, life expectancy from 30 years to 80 years. We're now able to cure diseases. We're able to give people with debilitating disease their lives back. So if you're part of that kind of enterprise, you can get up every day knowing you're moving the needle for society, you're moving the needle for mankind. I think we do reimagine medicine with the medicines we create. And I think that's a pretty inspiring way to spend your time.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in general, I have a philosophy that we call in our culture unbossed, and we try to unboss our people. We want our people to actually bring the ideas up. And then we, of course, have to challenge them, but then we make the calls. So I really believe that in our sector where some of our scientists are world-class and many of our scientists are world class, they should be bringing up the ideas and we have to curate them. But certainly I'm not sitting on some mountain here knowing what the right thing to do is certainly not.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most valuable thing I find in my job is to go around the world and meet our people, be able to have town halls and interactions. It used to be before we spun off all these businesses, 135,000 people. So we've definitely slimmed down. But I think there's nothing that can replace showing up face-to-face and describing why we do what we do.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I think the biggest thing I think about is curiosity, just relentless, relentless curiosity. I think whatever position I was put in at Novartis, it was usually a place where I didn't know anything, had to learn, teach myself, be relentlessly curious, and then apply it. And having experiences in a range of different parts of the business world is going to be a huge success.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's all part of our sustainability efforts, and we view it as part of our core mission to deliver these global health therapies to patients around the globe. So we have a huge effort in global health R&D. We invest $250 million, actually, in trying to discover the next wave of medicines to treat these global health conditions.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our big topic on sustainability is much more on access to medicines. And so we have a big effort on global access to medicines, trying to make sure our innovations are accessible, the work we do in areas like malaria, on leprosy, sickle cell disease to ensure populations around the world can get access to these medicines.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a couple of things one, RNA therapeutics, as I mentioned earlier in the broadcast, or RNA therapeutics, SIRNAs, these are really coming to life now. What this allows you to do is treat diseases that were not treatable or treat them with very infrequent drug dosing. And if you can imagine if we could take on blood pressure and cholesterol with once-year dosing, hugely transformative. Another one is cell therapy for immune diseases. We've seen extraordinary results in early phase studies that if you can reset somebody's immune system, they're autoimmune disease actually goes away. And we'll see if this sustains, but these are some of the most impressive results that we've ever seen in early stage clinical studies. And then the last is we're a very big in an area of cancer called radioligand therapy. This is the idea that can you bring nuclear particles right next to a cancer in the body and deliver the radiation very locally. And this has the opportunity to treat a whole range of solitum.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think AI is going to have a big impact, but I think it's going to take more time than most people expect. I think first, in productivity areas, AI has immediate applications. And I feel like in productivity, we can use AI for documentation.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we limit our use of investment bankers in general. What we try to look at is in the therapeutic areas we're in. So we're in blood cancers. We've been in blood cancers for over 20 years. Some of the most pioneering drugs in blood cancers have come from our research labs. And we say this is an area we're in, we have deep understanding. Therefore, this makes sense to actually add another medicine to that portfolio. And so we make that assessment if it's a good strategic fit. In this case, a good financial fit, we'll make the bet. One of the things we've tried to be much more disciplined on is to try to go at the lower end of the range to under $5 billion for acquisitions and really ensure that they're in areas we have deep understanding. Generally, when we've gone too far away from our core, the value creation hasn't been there.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they went along, and I think they generally were aligned, but I think it also was a stepwise journey. I mean, first, we did consumer health, and we saw how that went. And then a year later, we did Alcon, then the pandemic came, then we did Sandos, because I think the fear comes back from what we discussed earlier. When you have a business in innovative medicines and you have these patent cliffs, if you have these other businesses which are much more stable, there's a feeling like you can offset your risk. You have stable businesses and you have this one business where you face these cliffs every 15 to 17 years. I take the view that the only way you're going to generate enough medicines to keep growing is you focus your capital on innovation.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you know, when we have these conglomerates, you have to ask, is there value in the conglomerate? Is there value in building all these different businesses together? And then the question is, what are we really great at? And when I came into the role as CEO, I looked we were in consumer health, we were in eye care devices, we were in generics, we had a broad range, broad portfolio. And I think what our company is really great at is discovering these novel breakthroughs and then getting access to over 280 million patients, which is our reach today, largest, we believe, of any pharma company, to all of these patients. And so in order to do that well, I didn't think we could allocate capital successfully across all of these different businesses. We spun Alcon, the largest public market spin in recent memory in Europe. We spun out Sandos. We sold our consumer health business. It's about $130 billion of transactions later. We come out as a pure play medicines company, which I think we're best positioned for the long run.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was shocked. I was shocked when they first asked me to even be part of it. I mean, I had been head of drug development. I had the opportunity to do so many different roles at Novartis in developing vaccines. I worked in our vaccines division, leading a little bit of our generics unit, working in drug development for many, many years. And I think part of the reason they were interested is because I had gotten a background in R&D. But I think it was also not only my age, but also the fact that I think no other major pharmaceutical company had an R&D head or a development head as their CEO.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McKinsey was a great training ground for a physician who didn't know anything about a P&L, a balance sheet, knew nothing about M&A or valuation. I learned a lot very quickly, but I just felt like I was a little bit detached from the real action. And I had an opportunity presented to me to join Novartis, pharmaceuticals to really try to look at our R&D strategy at Novartis at the time. And it was a little bit of a whim, sort of a gamble to try to see how that would work out. I would have never imagined it would have unfolded the way it did, but it was really great.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father would ask I worked so hard to get out of these places why are you working so hard to go back to them with certainly a confusion he had in his mind but overall my parents were very supportive of this public health goal I had okay”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were very confused. They were very, very confused. I had this idea in my mind. I did a lot of work in public health. I had some great mentors at Harvard. And I really wanted to see how could I have a bigger impact beyond individual patient care. And so I wanted to, I first went to the World Health Organization, then I went to McKinsey. But all of this time, I certainly think my parents were assuming I was going to go back and do a residency and become a cardiologist and kind of finish the journey and it never actually worked out that way.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's an interesting story. I actually applied to all of the IVs and applied to a number of schools, and I didn't get in anywhere. Actually, the one school that actually did admit me was University of Chicago. And it ended up being such an incredible gift in the end because University of Chicago, I would still credit perhaps more than any other educational experience, taught me how to think, how to synthesize, how to be relentlessly curious. It was really positive.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. She did a degree in nuclear becoming a nuclear engineer. And yeah, it was, I think, a pretty extraordinary story in that they were able to come from relatively modest beginnings, sort of beginning with my grandparents in relatively small places in India, and ultimately find a way to the United States.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a long story in terms of the history of this industry. Even if you go back to the 70s or 80s, we were much more popular sector. I think one of the things that happened is as we brought more and more medicines forward and patients got on more and more therapies, the one thing we weren't watching carefully enough as an industry was what was happening at the pharmacy counter. There's a lot of focus in congressional hearings and other places on list prices, but list prices mean very little in the sector because you have pharmacy benefit managers, you have retail pharmacies, you have wholesalers. But what really matters is at the end of the day when somebody comes to the pharmacy counter, can they afford their medicines? And we're starting to address that. Some recent legislation addresses it. We're thinking a lot about it. But that's what we've got to figure out how to solve.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Now, where there's a lot of interest right now is can you identify things in the blood, things are circulating, so circulating tumor DNA that would show that the cancer is starting to happen in the body, but well before it would be detectable in any kind of scan. If we can get those tests up to an adequate level of precision and start to treat patients well before the cancer shows up, that would be the big opportunity. But that's still some time away.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're active, and I think what we're really interested in is, again, the next wave of what might be effective therapies for Alzheimer's disease. Today, there are one drug license, another drug coming, targeting the plaques in the brain, anti-amyloid drugs, as they're called. But we think the next generation opportunities are going to be to target other elements that accumulate in the brain. One is called TAW. There are other targets as well. But I would say Alzheimer's is a really tough space. I mean, one of the things that's very hard is you need to intervene very early because it's a very slowly progressing disease. And identifying which patients to intervene on and then figuring out what to treat them patients with is really, really difficult.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blood pressure, other risk factors for cardiovascular disease. And the idea is can you get to very infrequently dosed medicines? Because most people don't stay on their drugs.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a business we're interested in. We're working on really the next wave of medicines because I think these GLP1 medicines that you're talking about are very well serviced by the current companies. It's a fascinating story. It goes back actually to the early 1990s. It took us almost 25 years to realize the potent effect that these types of drugs would have on obesity. We think there's opportunity to improve on them. And we hope it's very early stage within Novartis, but can we come up with drugs to better preserve muscle or maybe easier to take and more infrequently taken? One area of where Novartis is one of the leaders is in what are called small interfering RNA therapies. It sounds like a fancy word, but really what it allows you to do is take drugs that you normally would take every single day and make them drugs you only have to take twice a year. So in cholesterol lowering, we have a medicine that you only have to take twice a year to lower cholesterol 60%. We're working on similar medicines for hypertension.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And that takes some time. AI might help us do that faster. We'll see. And then once we have that target drug optimized, we take it into animals, make sure it doesn't cause any preclinical safety signals, and then we finally move into humans. And from the time we move into humans to when we get it to people, it's usually around nine years.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tough way to make a business for sure. It means you're on a constant treadmill and you have to constantly have the innovation capacity to have what we call replacement power. You have to replace your sales with the next medicines, the next innovation. So the only winners in the long run are companies that have the R&D firepower, R&D capacity to keep inventing medicines to rejuvenate almost their entire portfolio. So you think of a company like us, $45 billion in sales every year we can have anywhere from two to eight billion dollars plus going off patent and we have to generate enough sales to replace that and grow on top and that's why you have a relatively limited number of very large biopharma companies.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a whole industry, maybe private equity, been interested to get into it, but there's a whole industry of people who basically try to find word permutations that might tie to the drug. And then you have to send it to the regulators, and they have to be sure that this word will not be confused in any number of different languages for some other medicine or something else.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple of major drugs we have right now, and Trusto is a medicine for heart failure, another drug cosentics for a whole range of immunology indications. We have a drug called Kiscali for breast cancer. As you know, these names are not always tying to what the drugs actually do. But yeah, we have a pretty broad portfolio of medicines, over 15 medicines over a billion dollars of sales.”
2024-03-07 · The David Rubenstein Show · Vas Narasimhan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source