‘Hyderabad key participant in Novartis value chain’
Narasimhan replied to a volley of questions from Rama Rao, who acknowledged the contribution of his predecessors in making a case for Hyderabad
IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao engaged in an interaction with Novartis Chief Executive Officer Vas Narasimhan at the 20th edition of BioAsia here. They discussed Hyderabad, its role in the pharma value chain, research, artificial intelligence and more. Narasimhan replied to a volley of questions from Rama Rao, who acknowledged the contribution of his predecessors in making a case for Hyderabad.
In Hyderabad, Novartis operations began about 18 years ago with a few hundred people. We have doubled the workforce now and brought all core drug development here. With 9,000 staff on the rolls, Hyderabad is one of the corporate centres for Novartis
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KTR: You have the second largest campus of Novartis outside of Basel in Hyderabad. You have a home in Basel and don’t you think you should have one in Hyderabad as well?
Vas: Maybe yes. But for me, Hyderabad is always a home away from home. You feel immense energy when you are here. A lot of talented people are here. This energy is helping the company. These are the people who are fully integrated with our global processes. Our focus is on key products, key transformations that can be brought about and others. That is a huge help for us for the past 18 years.
KTR: When I meet pharma companies, they talk about how the processes have changed over the years. We are now talking about how biomedical engineering has reshaped the industry and how pharma industries are looking at the problem of availability and accessibility. How has Hyderabad contributed to your growth?
Vas: Hyderabad is one facility that we have built up. We have global development programmes happening in Hyderabad. Analysis of a lot of data happens here.
Hyderabad is a key participant in the Novartis value chain. Global drug development projects happen here. We are always doing major transformative projects. We also see more and more global leadership roles coming out of Hyderabad in areas such as IT, finance, ESG. We are working on being carbon neutral and net zero. Global teams working on environmental matters are also in Hyderabad. Augmented or artificial intelligence will help some processes.
KTR: How do you define research and development at Novartis?
Vas: Basic science, discovery work, finding new drug candidates, developing these candidates through pre-clinical research, and preparing them for global investigation all happen in our research. Then it is moved to the drug development wing for scaling up. Then we do clinical and regulatory trials. We have more than 3,200 people in the drug development segment, which is the second largest or perhaps the largest in the world. Then we evaluate the various steps to be taken. The easy ones are data science and AI. Step by step, we look at pre-clinical processes. Then we focus on the value chain. If India continues to strengthen its IP environment and its regulatory protection environment, and if that happens, it will benefit. I think that should be the aspiration for India in the longer term. The national policy environment needs to be able to support that.
KTR: We are getting ready to launch the world’s largest pharma and life sciences cluster, Pharma City. Our focus will be to take a value approach and not just a volume approach. We need to ensure that the right IP and regulatory frameworks are in place.
KTR: Have you used ChatGPT? Do you ever see artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence?
Vas: Yes, I have used ChatGPT. AI augments human intelligence but there is a limit. They can help in value addition but there is also a danger of relying too much on them without human oversight. We can get about 60% accuracy but we need 100% accuracy in what we do.
KTR: I was recently at the World Economic Forum. I had some Euros and not Franc. I asked the lady at the counter if she would accept Euros. She said she cannot accept it without using a calculator to get the value. This left me thinking what if the technology at hand is absent, or fails or goes missing? I think we should continue to seek answers or pose questions without relying too much on tools.
