Posted by Michael Wonder on 01 Dec 2018
Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan on the price of gene therapies: 'it's a challenge we have to solve'
29 November 2018 - In May Novartis announced that it had acquired the gene therapy pioneer AveXis in a $8.7 billion deal, but according to the the Swiss drug giant's CEO, Vas Narasimhan, he wishes he could have bought the company much earlier.
“When I first read the New England Journal of Medicine paper in 2017 I wanted to buy the company. If I had done that it would have been a lot cheaper, but it didn’t work out at that point in time,” Narasimhan said on stage at the Forbes Healthcare Summit Thursday in Manhattan.
AveXis is developing a therapy for a type of a rare genetic disease called spinal muscular atrophy type one; nine out of ten infants born with the disease die before they turn 2 years old or are permanently dependent on a ventilator. (Biogen and Ionis currently have a medicine for the disease.)
