Pharma CEOs push back on Silicon Valley's AI cure pitch

At the Wall Street Journal Health Forum, the executives who actually ship medicines pushed back on the Silicon Valley line that AI could cure most diseases within a decade. Novartis chief Vas Narasimhan called AI "another tool in the toolbox." The regulatory tally gives the pharma side its blunt data point: the FDA has yet to clear any AI-designed biotech drug.

Amgen's David Reese was sharper on a separate panel this fall. "The folks saying that generally have never actually worked on disease biology, and don't have an appreciation for just how complicated it is," he said, per the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Where pharma executives say AI is already pulling weight is in early-stage work: target identification, molecule screening, compound optimization. Those uses occupy a small slice of the 10-to-15-year, multi-billion-dollar path a single therapy takes from discovery to approval, which is why the CEOs frame the distance between model outputs and clinical utility as the unresolved problem. The story sits inside a wider run of healthcare AI coverage we've tracked over the past 90 days, most of it flowing the other direction: new biology models, new partnerships, new regulatory sandboxes.