Back in June of last year at the Viva Tech event in Paris, Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, took to the stage to summarise the journey Novartis has taken in recent years to “reimagine medicine”. Vas’ talk is followed by a fireside chat with Karen Tso, Europe Anchor at CNBC.
Key questions Vas addresses:
- How to do we simplify very complex trials to bring it closer to the patient? With decentralised trials – how do you make it easy for any physician to become a clinical trialist?
Through the use of technology to mine international electronic health records we can find patients who could benefit from clinical trials and speed up drug development. For example,the use of Apple Health Research kit and other tech can bring CTs closer to patients. Pivotal CTs, submitted to regulatory authorities entirely from an app-based platform, which are building on consumer tech to use continuous sensor monitoring such as wearables, have driven increases in patient engagement in their migraine trials.
- How do we get deeper insights into the vast amounts of data we collect as a company and across our industry
Through the application of image recognition technologies to digitalise 100% of pathology slides within the Novartis collection. The power of unstructured ML to find markers of disease progression and new patient populations and new ways to intervene. E.g. AI and ML have proven to be better at predicting cancer skin lesions than physicians.
The grand challenge for Novartis, he explains, is how to bring all the data sets into data lakes to fully interrogate biomedical datasets to look for patient populations and biomarkers.
