{"id":117496,"date":"2026-08-19T15:35:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T15:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/117496\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T15:35:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T15:35:20","slug":"novartis-ceo-vas-narasimhan-joins-anthropics-board-as-biopharmas-ties-to-ai-deepen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/117496\/","title":{"rendered":"Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan joins Anthropic\u2019s board as biopharma\u2019s ties to AI deepen"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI heavyweight Anthropic has appointed <\/a>Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board of directors as the link between the pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley deepens.<\/p>\n

Narasimhan shares Anthropic\u2019s vision that healthcare and life sciences are among the areas where AI has the greatest potential to improve the quality of human life, Anthropic said in an April 14 announcement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting powerful new technology to people safely and at scale is what we think about every day at Anthropic,\u201d Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, said in Tuesday\u2019s statement. \u201cVas has been doing exactly that for years, and I\u2019m grateful he\u2019s joining us.\u201d<\/p>\n

By tapping Narasimhan, the Claude maker and self-dubbed \u201cAI safety and research company\u201d is inching closer toward the world of biotech innovation while navigating the ethical boundaries that are also key to medicine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for Novartis, the marriage could be a prelude to further investments in AI, a path that the pharma industry as a whole has eagerly embarked on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn healthcare, AI is accelerating solutions to some of the hardest scientific challenges, from deepening our understanding of disease biology to designing better medicines,\u201d Narasimhan said in a statement. \u201cAnthropic is setting the standard for how AI should be developed to benefit humanity, and I\u2019m honored to join the Board and contribute to its mission.\u201d
\u00a0<\/p>\n

RELATED: Novartis pens $1.7B immuno-dermatology pact with AI-enabled British biotech<\/a><\/p>\n

Novartis has formed several partnerships focused on AI for drug discovery. In early 2024, the Swiss pharma entered into<\/a> a research collaboration with Alphabet\u2019s Isomorphic Labs to use the latter\u2019s AI platform, including AlphaFold, to discover small molecules against three undisclosed targets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other company that tapped Isomorphic\u2019s AI capabilities at that same time, Eli Lilly, has recently become a poster child of pharma\u2019s commitment to AI, what with a supercomputer<\/a> and a co-innovation lab<\/a> with Nvidia.<\/p>\n

Besides Isomorphic, Novartis has also made AI-related bets on Schr\u00f6dinger<\/a>, Flagship Pioneering-founded Generate:Biomedicines<\/a> before its recent IPO and London-based Relation Therapeutics<\/a>, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think AI is something that now has become part of the toolkit certainly for target identification [and] candidate optimization,\u201d Narasimhan said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January. \u201cFrom a drug target standpoint, we\u2019ll have to see how AI pans out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way we think about it is having deep partnerships,\u201d he continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Novartis\u2019 vision is to slash the time between deciding to pursue a target and the first clinical studies for associated drugs in half, from an average of four years to roughly two, while increasing the probability of success significantly, Narasimhan said.<\/p>\n

But as Anthropic knows well, adventures in AI can be accompanied by significant turbulence. The company, embroiled in a high-profile legal dispute with the Pentagon over the use of its AI models, has been labeled as a \u201csupply chain risk,\u201d although the designation is being challenged in court. President Donald Trump has ordered a ban of Anthropic across the federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Novartis declined to comment on potential regulatory or political repercussions from Narasimhan\u2019s appointment, only saying that, \u201cNovartis congratulates Vas Narasimhan on his appointment to the Board of Directors at Anthropic.\u201d
\u00a0<\/p>\n

RELATED: HHS bans Claude AI tool as Trump seeks full government blacklisting of Anthropic<\/a><\/p>\n

Under Narasimhan\u2019s leadership, Novartis a few years ago adopted<\/a> a U.S.-first strategy, putting an emphasis on the U.S. market across its business segments and in every step of its decision-making process. Last year, the Swiss firm also joined its peers in forming a \u201cmost favored nation\u201d drug pricing deal<\/a> with the Trump administration and committed to spending $23 billion<\/a> on U.S. manufacturing and R&D.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Narasimhan\u2019s appointment to Anthropic\u2019s board also comes shortly after its Swiss compatriot, Roche, teamed up with Nvidia<\/a> on a \u201chybrid-cloud AI factory\u201d designed to accelerate development for therapeutics and diagnostics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Narasimhan may be the first pharmaceutical executive to join the governing body of a large AI powerhouse like Anthropic, but he\u2019s not the first from the biopharma world to take a personal interest in guiding an AI firm. His predecessor at Novartis, Joe Jimenez, a co-founder and managing director at the venture capital outfit Aditum Bio, recently joined<\/a> the advisory board of Aily Labs, an AI software company enabling enterprise decision-making, alongside Derica Rice, who previously served as president of CVS Caremark and CFO of Lilly.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI heavyweight Anthropic has appointed Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board of directors as the link between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[127],"tags":[41951,7801,225,3111,984,9275,41939,206,2536,9827],"class_list":["post-117496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-novartis","tag-ai-and-machine-learning","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-corporate-governance","tag-executives","tag-fierce-biotech-homepage","tag-fierce-pharma-homepage","tag-novartis","tag-pharma","tag-vas-narasimhan"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117122912888302371","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}