Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan on Transforming a 250-Year-Old Company
a16z general partner Jorge Conde talks with Vasant Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis International, about transforming a 250-year-old conglomerate into a pure play medicines company and unlocking $180 billion of value in the process. They cover Novartis's platform technologies: cell and gene therapies, RNA medicines, and radioligand therapies. They also discuss AI in drug discovery, the rise of China as a biotech competitor, and what Vasant looks for when evaluating startup partnerships, including his advice on the killer experiments and CMC work that can make or break a deal. Resources: Follow Vasant Narasimhan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasnarasimhan/ Follow Jorge Conde on X: https://x.com/JorgeCondeBio Stay Updated: Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube Find a16z on X Find a16z on Linke
Could not retrieve the full article text.
Read on a16z Podcast →Sign in to highlight and annotate this article

Conversation starters
Daily AI Digest
Get the top 5 AI stories delivered to your inbox every morning.
Knowledge Map
Connected Articles — Knowledge Graph
This article is connected to other articles through shared AI topics and tags.
More in Products

This Is How To Tell if Writing Was Made by AI | Odd Lots
When you consider the fact that many people don't know how and where to place a comma, it's safe to say that AI is already better than most people at writing. It's clean copy. It can be surprisingly persuasive. And sometimes, it's even informative. But there's frequently still something about it that just seems... off. Many people can tell quite quickly when they're reading AI-generated text. So how do you actually tell if a piece of writing was generated by AI? On this episode, we speak with Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram Labs, a company that built software to detect whether a piece of content was AI generated or not. We talk about the advanced techniques they use, the risk of false positives and false negatives, and what AI writing means in general for the future of the Internet. (Source:


Discussion
Sign in to join the discussion
No comments yet — be the first to share your thoughts!