Interview: Novartis' Haseeb Ahmad - 'Working with the NHS will develop more cures than we have ever seen'

“That type of partnership hasn’t happened before and it’s a lot easier to partner if you’re in the same town. How we collaborate has to be just as innovative if we want to transform the healthcare system,” says Ahmad. Another study will see Novartis work with the NHS and Oxford university on Orion-4, a global research study into a potential cholesterol-lowering injection.

He elaborates: “The nature of medicines is changing and we wanted to really double down. We wanted to be a research-intensive medicines company, focused on new, high-tech prescription-based medicines.”

It’s a position that’s taken time to reach. “If you look at the last 20 years, Novartis has scaled back from being an unwieldy company with businesses across generics, vaccines, diagnostics, and consumer healthcare to become a more-focused, medicines business,” says Liberum analyst Graham Doyle, who adds that Novartis’s lack of scale in consumer healthcare meant it was a sensible sell-off. There’s even talk that its generics business, Sandoz, will be spun off or sold.

But some in the City have questioned the risk involved in rebalancing away from everyday drugs. “There’s always a trade-off between having a diversified business and having focus. Ultimately strategy’s a choice and choosing to do everything isn’t a choice,” says Ahmad. This strategy has been overshadowed by a string of scandals. There were bribery and data-tampering allegations in Japan and the submission of manipulated data on its Zolgensma drug to US regulators. Novartis has also defended holding a “global lottery” to “win” a dose of the drug, used to treat infants with a life-threatening genetic disease.

Separately, the firm revealed in 2018 it paid Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen $1.2 million for advice on Obamacare that he proved “unable” to carry out. Investors appear unfazed; the shares are up 35% over the past four years.

Looking ahead, the pharma giant is busy launching several key drugs including treatments for lung cancer and sickle cell disease, estimated to add around 5% to revenue growth annually for the next three years. Ahmad says the firm is ready to help deal with coronavirus, but it doesn’t produce vaccines.

Running Novartis’s UK arm is something of a coup for Ahmad. He points out it has 800 million customers worldwide “or 10% of humanity”. He’s an industry lifer after being tempted into healthcare by his family.

His parents came to Liverpool from India and Pakistan, and he spent his childhood observing the goodwill of his GP mother’s and nephrologist father’s patients. His dad co-invented an early portable kidney dialysis machine. Ahmad’s youth had plenty of Merseyside hallmarks: he went to school on Penny Lane, had his haircut at the Beatles’ barber, lived down the road from Brookside’s set and spends his time following Jurgen Klopp’s high-flying Reds.

His career began in sales at US behemoth Schering-Plough (later Merck Sharp & Dohme) in Nottingham, before switching to marketing and studying how drugs were developed and launched. Jobs followed in Ireland and Greece, where he endured the economic crisis. “When I arrived the government hadn’t paid us for 520 days but we were still supplying medicines.

There was no question we wouldn’t, it’s a long life cycle business,” he says, noting Novartis has been in the UK for more than 100 years. There, he has set about changing the culture to the idea of being “unbossed” – allowing employees at any level to contribute to decision making. “There’s a lot of intellectual masturbation around leadership and culture but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt on my journey is that happy people are more productive,” he explains. He’s also forthright on diversity, keen that “you can bring your full self to work, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are”.

There’s no sign of hiding for this Scouser on a mission.