The 41-year-old company head already started building Nerve, a software system designed to monitor patient data in 550 clinical trials of Novartis’ drugs. Nerve deploys analytics techniques that could be used to make predictions about the trials’ errors or successes.
“When you look at history, it takes the medical establishment 50 to 75 years to actually change how we do clinical studies,” Dr. Narasimhan told Forbes. “The first clinical study was done in 1670, the first placebo-controlled study in 1880, the first randomized controlled clinical trial in the 1940s. So now we enter a world where we do some things better than we used to, but fundamentally, we’ve not rethought how we do clinical trials. So we really approach it from the perspective of ‘How could we use technology just to leapfrog many of the challenges?'”
Though the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to adopt technologies, Dr. Narasimhan is looking to integrate artificial intelligence, telemedicine, automation and quantum computing into inventing new medicines and testing their safety — two labor-intensive processes.
He is convinced “going big on data and digital” will be vital in giving Novartis a competitive edge. “Our odds at Novartis of finding bad decisions, then making the right decisions, go up when we are powered by these machine capabilities and artificial intelligences,” Dr. Narasimhan told Forbes.
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