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. His frame is not incremental improvement but a mission to address human suffering at scale.
“I didn't think we could allocate capital successfully across all of these different businesses. So we spun Alcon, spun out Sandoz, sold our consumer health business. About one hundred and thirty billion dollars of transactions. We come out as a pure play medicines company.”
“The only way you're going to generate enough medicines to keep growing is you focus your capital on innovation.”
“Generally, when we've gone too far away from our core, the value creation hasn't been there.”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Vas Narasimhan”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE