The appointment of Vas Narasimhan as Novartis AG’s chief executive in February 2018 was seen as a changing of the guard for the Swiss major and the pharmaceutical sector as a whole. Then aged 41, he came in looking to transform the group into a focused medicines company powered by data and digital technologies that would use machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform drug research.
To do that would require a significant shift in culture, a subject Narasimhan has returned to repeatedly in the two...