Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan says he's focused on developing the next wave of therapies for Alzheimer and cancer. He speaks on "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations".

Basel

Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan has publicly stated his company's commitment to advancing medical treatment for Alzheimer's and cancer. This announcement was made during an appearance on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations”, where Narasimhan outlined his focus on creating a new generation of therapies for these significant health challenges. 

The explicit mention of Alzheimer's and cancer indicates Novartis' targeted approach towards addressing two of the most critical and prevalent health issues today. This initiative underscores the pharmaceutical giant's strategic direction in research and development, aiming to contribute profoundly to medical science and patient care.



Novartis CEO on next gen Alzheimer and cancer treatments

as I get older the drug that I'm most interested in is one that deals with Alzheimer's or dementia because I'm always wondering am I going to be getting this disease. What are you doing in that area. So we're active. And I think what we're really interested in is again the next wave of what might be effective therapies for Alzheimer's disease. Today there are two drug one drug license another drug coming targeting the plaques in the brain anti amyloid drugs as they're called. We think the next generation opportunities are going to be to target other elements that accumulate in the brain. One is called Tao. There are other targets as well. But I would say Alzheimer's is a really tough space. I mean one of the things that's very hard is you need to intervene very early because it's a very slowly progressing disease. And that identifying which patients to intervene on and then figuring out what to treat them patients with is really really difficult. Cancer related drugs. There are some cancer related drugs and I guess you have some as well. But they tend to deal with cancer. Once you have cancer they try to ameliorate the side effects of it or the effects of it. What about something that prevents cancer. Is that realistic in my lifetime. That is something that's a heavy interest of the field and also at our company. We actually just got great data on a breast cancer drug which can be given to women who have had their breast cancer resected but then to prevent it recurring. Now where there's a lot of interest right now is can you identify things in the blood. Things are circulating. So circulating tumor DNA that would show that the cancer is starting to happen in the body but well before it would be detectable in any kind of scan. If we can get those tests up to an adequate level of precision and start to treat patients well before the cancer shows up that would be the big opportunity. But that's still some time away.

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Council of the City of Sydney

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