Basel, Switzerland, February 2026 – Sander Timme has been appointed as Head of AI & Data Science for Global Drug Development at Novartis, marking a significant leadership move as the company advances its AI-driven transformation in medicine development.
Announcing his move, Sander shared:
“I’m joining Novartis in Basel to accelerate how we bring medicines to patients. The opportunity is clear: AI can fundamentally change the speed and precision of drug development, from candidate optimization through clinical trials and CMC to regulatory submission.
Novartis has one of the industry’s most innovative pipelines. My focus: building AI capabilities and solutions that compress timelines at scale without compromising rigor. Digital twins, agentic systems, and decision intelligence applied to the toughest problems in global drug development.”
Sander brings a rare blend of deep scientific expertise and enterprise-scale AI leadership. Prior to joining Novartis, he spent over six years at GSK, where he most recently served as Global Senior Director, Forward Deployed AI Engineering & Decision Sciences – Enterprise AI. In this role, he established forward-deployed AI engineering teams embedded directly within Global Supply Chain operations, delivering validated business value through AI solutions integrated at the point of decision-making. He led unified AI operations platforms covering hundreds of solutions and multi-agent systems, while advancing physical AI, robotics, digital twins, and AI governance aligned with EU AI Act and FDA standards.
Earlier at GSK, Sander founded and scaled a global AI Centre of Excellence from inception, building high-performing teams across multiple geographies and delivering AI-driven innovations in CMC, manufacturing, and quality. His work spanned digital twins for GMP environments, GenAI copilots, MLOps and LLMOps platforms, and enterprise-grade AI governance frameworks. As Global Director of Analytics & AI – GSK Vaccines, he pioneered R&D AI applications from target discovery through Phase 3 clinical trials, including protein language models, digital clinical twins, and regulatory document automation.
Before transitioning fully into pharmaceutical AI leadership, Sander held senior AI and health leadership roles at Microsoft across EMEA, advising global healthcare and life sciences organizations on AI-enabled diagnostics, digital biomarkers, precision medicine, and AI-driven clinical trial optimization. His earlier career includes deep scientific research, including a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences (Bioinformatics) from University of Cambridge, where his work focused on large-scale epigenomics and machine learning applications in biomedical data.
At Novartis, Sander will focus on building AI-native capabilities across candidate optimization, clinical development, chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC), and regulatory pathways—applying digital twins, agentic systems, and decision intelligence to accelerate medicine development while maintaining scientific rigor.
About Novartis
Novartis is an innovative medicines company dedicated to reimagining medicine to improve and extend people’s lives. Its therapies reach more than 250 million people worldwide, addressing serious diseases through science-driven innovation and global collaboration.
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