Novartis CEO explains how AI will impact drug development

In This Article:

One of the top topics at the World Economic Forum is generative AI, with endless discussions on how it can impact a broad range of sectors and businesses. Pharmaceutical drug development is one of those sectors where AI can help improve the research and development pipeline. Novartis (NVS) recently announced a partnership with Alphabet (GOOG,GOOGL) owned Isomorphic Labs, which will leverage its AI platform to develop small molecule drugs.

Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan joins Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi to discuss how Novartis, and pharmaceutical companies in general, will use AI going forward to expedite the drug development process and potentially make breakthroughs in medicine.

Narasimhan explains that while AI won't have a large impact in the next five years, it will still aid in a number of ways: "Impacting the next five years is how AI is going to impact many of our productivity efforts, in drug development, how fast can we generate new trial protocols? How fast can we work with regulators? How fast we can look at patient safety, look at large patient data sets? Not necessarily...it is generative AI, but may be not the most cutting-edge generative AI. Those areas will hopefully give us six months, maybe nine months, but if we want some of the big gains, that's going to take longer."

It's all part of Yahoo Finance's exclusive coverage from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where our team will speak to top decision-makers as well as preeminent leaders in business, finance, and politics about the world’s most pressing issues and priorities for the coming year.Watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live here.

Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Let's talk about the intersection of one of the big themes here in Davos with health care, that is, AI and health care. That was part of our conversation, for example, with Bill Gates the other day where he talked about the way that AI is informing health care discoveries, drug discovery, for example. So let's bring in Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to talk more about this. I mean, is AI everything here at Davos this year, Vas? Thank you so much for--

VASANT NARASIMHAN: It does feel like an AI conference.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, it really does. I mean, you know, are you guys using AI yet when it comes to things like drug discovery? And I guess, I mean specifically generative AI because that's usually what we're talking about now.

VASANT NARASIMHAN: Yeah, we've been in actually generative AI for a number of years. We signed a collaboration with Microsoft Research Labs even three, four years ago where we developed an approach called generative chemistry to try to speed up how fast we can bring new medicines into the clinic.