Daniel L. Vasella, M.D.
Daniel L. Vasella, M.D.
Advisor
Daniel Vasella, MD, currently acts as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Numab Therapeutics AG, after his initial appointment to the Board in 2019 and then promoted to Chairman in 2020. Dr. Vasella, served as Chairman of Novartis AG, a leading global medicines company, from 1999 until 2013 and as Chief Executive Officer of Novartis AG from 1996 to January 2010. From 1992 to 1996, Dr. Vasella held the positions of Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Senior Vice President, and Head of Worldwide Development and Head of Corporate Marketing at Sandoz Pharma Ltd. He also served at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Corporation, U.S.A. from 1988 to 1992.
Vasella received an M.D. degree in 1980 from the University of Bern, Switzerland. For the next four years, he held residencies at various hospitals in Bern and Zürich before serving (1984–88) as the attendant physician at C.L. Lory-Haus at Bern University Hospital. He left medicine in 1988 and joined the marketing department of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Corp. in New Jersey, the U.S.-based division of Sandoz Pharma Ltd. The following year Vasella graduated from Harvard Business School, and he moved up quickly in the marketing and sales department at Sandoz to become department head of special-product marketing. In 1994 Vasella returned to Switzerland and accepted the position of head of the worldwide development office at Sandoz’s headquarters in Basel. He was named CEO of Sandoz the following year. Early in 1996 Vasella was named CEO of the newly formed Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, which was established as a result of the largest merger ever in the pharmaceutical industry. The combined company united industry giants Sandoz Ltd. and Ciba-Geigy Ltd., two Swiss-based health care groups, in a $29 billion merger that made Novartis second in size and influence only to Britain’s Glaxo Wellcome, the world’s largest pharmaceutical concern. As CEO, Vasella was responsible for coordinating the integration of the Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy product lines.
Dr. Vasella currently also serves on the board of PepsiCo, American Express Company, SciClone Pharmaceuticals, and several biotech companies. He is the recipient of numerous honors, in 2003 he received Harvard Business School’s Alumni Achievement Award and the CancerCare Human Services Award.