More Big data, rather than Big ideas
No, I could not run, lead or guide a pharma company. Tough business. But I just hope their executives do not really believe most of what they say. So, in a FT article about the new CE of Novartis, Vas Narasimhan, has vowed to slash drug development costs; there will be a productivity revolution; 10-25 per cent could be cut from the cost of trials if digital technology were used to carry them out more efficiently.
And of course:
(he) plans to partner with, or acquire, artificial intelligence and data analytics companies, to supplement Novartis’s strong but “scattered” data science capability.
I really think of our future as a medicines and data science company, centred on innovation and access (read that again, parenthesis mine)
And to add insult to injury:
Dr Narasimhan cites one inspiration as a visit to Disney World with his young children where he saw how efficiently people were moved around the park, constantly monitored by “an army of Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained data scientists”.
And not that I am a lover of Excel…
No longer rely on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides, but instead “bring up a screen that has a predictive algorithm that in real time is recalculating what is the likelihood our trials enrol, what is the quality of our clinical trials”
Just recall that in 2000 it would have been genes / genetics / genomics rather than data / analytics / AI / ML etc
So, looks to me like lots of cost cutting and optimisation. No place for a James Black, then.