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Head of Data Science and AI for Global Drug Development at Novartis, leading the strategic integration of AI to accelerate how we reimagine medicine for patients. Based in Basel, I focus on fundamentally changing the speed and precision of drug development—from candidate optimization and clinical trials through CMC to regulatory submission.

The opportunity is clear: AI can compress timelines at scale without compromising rigor. My focus is on building enterprise-grade capabilities in Digital Twins, Agentic Systems, and Decision Intelligence applied to one of the industry’s most innovative drug pipelines.

Professional Foundation & Impact

Prior to Novartis, I served as the Global Senior Director of AI/ML & Decision Sciences at GSK (2019–2026), where I built and scaled a distributed team of 40+ engineers. We pivoted from a centralized CoE to an embedded, forward-deployed model, delivering AI at the point of decision-making across a global network of 37 manufacturing sites.

My work is defined by bridging AI/ML and life sciences—a journey that began with a PhD from Cambridge in Machine Learning and Epigenomics and continued at Microsoft (2015–2019), where I led AI strategy for global health and life sciences organizations.

Core Technical Pillars:

  • Accelerating Drug Development: Deploying AI to optimize the end-to-end development value chain (Candidate → Trial → Submission).
  • Physical AI & Agentic Systems: Scaling autonomous agentic workflows and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for GxP environments.
  • AI Ops at Scale: Running unified AI operations for 300+ solutions and 400k+ industrialized models with full observability and governance.
  • Strategic Transformation: Driving the evolution from traditional BI to Conversational and Agentic Decision Intelligence.

Key Achievements

  • Value Realization: Delivered significant validated business value through AI-driven yield optimization and efficiency.
  • TwinOps Innovation: Pioneered GxP-compliant digital twins that achieved +20% yield and unlocked +1M vaccine doses.
  • Governance & Compliance: Established global AI Council frameworks ensuring EU AI Act and FDA compliance across 300+ AI solutions.
  • Pioneering R&D: Founded GSK’s first AI division for vaccines, deploying protein language models and BERT-based automation.

Education

Sander obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge and EMBL-EBI, specializing in Big Data Biology. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Selected Past Projects

Beyond Human Performance (VLM Research)

Pioneering multi-agent AI frameworks using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to automate GxP-compliant quality control, achieving 99% precision in biomanufacturing.

Multi-Agent AI Architecture

The Era of Physical AI (Fully Connected)

Keynote at Weights & Biases Fully Connected on transitioning from digital agents to Physical AI interacting with global supply chains and biological processes.

 

TwinOps: Scaling Digital Twins

Operational framework for industrializing Digital Twins. Deployment across global sites delivered +20% yield and +1M additional vaccine doses.

Industrializing AI (Databricks Summit)

Strategic session at the 2024 Databricks Data & AI Summit on scaling pharma AI from experimental pilots to global, production-grade platforms.

Databricks Data & AI Summit

AI4leprosy with Novartis Foundation

A long-standing collaboration with the Novartis Foundation and Microsoft to develop AI tools for early leprosy detection.

Professional Interests

Global AI Strategy · Drug Development Acceleration · Forward Deployed AI Engineering · Physical AI & Robotics · Digital Twins · Multi-Agent Systems · AI Ops & Value Realization · GxP Compliance · Decision Sciences · Genomics & Computational Biology · Cloud-Native Architecture