On a hot streak, No­var­tis ex­ecs run the odds on their two most im­por­tant PhI­II read­outs. Which is 0.01% more like­ly to suc­ceed?

No­var­tis CEO Vas Narasimhan is liv­ing in the sweet spot right now.

The num­bers are run­ning a bit bet­ter than ex­pect­ed, the pipeline — which he as­sem­bled as de­vel­op­ment chief — is per­form­ing and the stock popped more than 4% on Thurs­day as the ex­ec­u­tive team ran through their as­sess­ment of Q2 per­for­mance.

Year-to-date the stock is up 28%, so the in­vestors will be beam­ing. Any­one look­ing for chinks in their ar­mor — and there are plen­ty giv­ing it a shot — right now fo­cus on pay­er ac­cep­tance of their $2.1 mil­lion gene ther­a­py Zol­gens­ma, where it’s ear­ly days. And CAR-T con­tin­ues to un­der­per­form, but No­var­tis doesn’t ap­pear to be suf­fer­ing from it.

So what could go wrong?

Ac­tu­al­ly, not much. But Tim An­der­son at Wolfe pressed Narasimhan and his de­vel­op­ment chief John Tsai to pick which of two loom­ing Phase III read­outs with block­buster im­pli­ca­tion had the bet­ter odds of suc­cess.

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