No­var­tis CEO Vas Narasimhan: We can do bet­ter at R&D, but we need FDA’s help; J&J gets $2.1B bid for LifeS­can

→ Why has med­ical in­no­va­tion in car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases stag­nat­ed even as oth­er ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas have thrived? No­var­tis CEO Vas Narasimhan thinks a shift from broad-based de­vel­op­ment strate­gies to a more fo­cused med­i­cines ap­proach is need­ed, and drug mak­ers, reg­u­la­tors and pay­ers all have a role to play.

In a col­umn pub­lished in For­tune this week, Narasimhan ar­gues that phar­ma com­pa­nies need to be bet­ter at pre­ci­sion med­i­cine in this field: cat­e­go­riz­ing pa­tients, track­ing bio­mark­ers, and us­ing more re­al world da­ta. They can’t, how­ev­er, do it alone; reg­u­la­tors must adopt their poli­cies to rec­og­nize “sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly ro­bust sub­group da­ta” for that to work. Last­ly, he wrote, pay­ers could make it eas­i­er for pa­tients by im­ple­ment­ing val­ue-based re­im­burse­ment strate­gies. Giv­en the case No­var­tis has been pitch­ing for canakinum­ab, Narasimhan has a stake in push­ing for all this: “There’s been much dis­cus­sion on this top­ic, but the time to act is now.”

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