As big pharma meets AI, new career paths open in Switzerland

Switzerland is a growing hub for AI research and start-ups particularly in areas such as biomedical engineering. Keystone / Gaetan Bally

Switzerland is one of the world’s leading pharma hubs, but it’s also a growing hot spot for AI research, start-ups and major technology companies. The combination is giving pharma professionals in the country opportunities beyond traditional drugmakers.

Pharmaceutical companies like Swiss giants Novartis and Roche are betting big on artificial intelligence to discover and develop new drugs. In 2025, the top 20 pharma firms spent some $29.5 billion (CHF24.5 billion) on AI drug discovery deals, up from $15.4 million the year before, accordingExternal link to consulting firm McKinsey.

Meanwhile AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to develop tools for the data-heavy scientific, clinical, and commercial work of the drug industry. In June, the CEO of Microsoft’s AI division, Mustafa Suleyman, calledExternal link healthcare “the most important application of AI”.

For pharma professionals based in Switzerland, the convergence of pharma and AI is opening new career paths. Basel is already one of the world’s top pharma hubs while Zurich is emerging as a centre of AI innovation, thanks to top universities and funding for AI research as well as start-ups that have attracted big names in AI.

OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, along with Anthropic have set up operations in Zurich. Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, opened its first office outside the United Kingdom in Lausanne.

Nives Rombini is one of a small but growing number of scientists who spent years working for pharmaceutical companies and are now being drawn to AI, believing they’ll make more impact in a tech company than in traditional pharma.

The Swiss-Italian national studied immunology at the University of Bern and was always interested in the life sciences industry. But she also has a passion for data and automation, spending time after her studies as a trainee at the telecom provider Swisscom.

Rombini joined US pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) in western Switzerland in 2021, becoming a senior scientist in 2023, making sense of patient data to help the company decide what research areas to pursue.

But in 2024, at age 29, she quit her job, frustrated by how inefficiently pharma companies process large-scale data, and co-founded Zurich-based tech start-up Navis Bio.

“At Navis, I have almost the same job processing data as I did in big pharma, but now I can build a platform to do it,” Rombini told Swissinfo.

Her startup’s AI-powered software automates the monumental task of analysing thousands of clinical trials, patents, and scientific papers to help drugmakers identify target diseases. Building such software would be hard to do inside pharma.  

“It’s almost intrinsic in the type of business that pharma does, that they cannot really move fast and break things,” said Rombini. “It’s structurally hard to really push the frontiers in big pharma. And this is what we are trying to do.”

It takes on average more than a decade and $2.3 billion to develop a drug, and only 10% of drugs that enter clinical trials are successful. AI-driven R&D efforts could deliverExternal link time and costs savings of at least 25-50% in the drug discovery phase, according to Boston Consulting Group. To tap this potential, dozens of AI-driven drug discovery companies, such as HAYA Therapeutics, Onena Medicines and Adaptiv Bio, have set up in Switzerland in the last decade.

Beyond the scientist

AI isn’t only opening new career paths for laboratory scientists and researchers. Professionals with pharma experience across a range of functions, such as pricing, reimbursement, market access and customer strategy, are finding opportunities with specialist AI service providers.

This is because of the way AI is being applied across the entire chain: from analysing biological data to identifying potential targets and refining candidate medicines, to designing clinical trials and supporting manufacturing, regulatory, pricing and commercial decisions.

“You always had scientists in pharma, leaving to create biotech companies,” said David Vanni, who spent seven years working for Novartis, most recently as associate director for global customer strategy in oncology. “What you see now is pharma talent moving into AI startups, from different roles, bringing the business context into AI solutions.” Previously, this was only possible if you went to work in a consulting firm, he said.

Vanni, who worked in commercial, marketing, and customer-strategy roles in Shanghai and Basel, saw potential for AI to streamline processes and bring more evidence into commercial decision-making. After executive training in AI, he thought, like Rombini, that he had a better chance to address these gaps as a technology provider to big pharma.

In July, he joined Singapore-headquartered start-up CHOIR, which develops AI business intelligence solutions for pharmaceutical companies, leading its global sales and marketing activities from the company’s new Zurich offices.

There are now a host of start-ups combining AI and pharma expertise that seek to bring greater efficiency into pharma companies. Basel-based Lyfegen is using AI to help with pricing and reimbursement, Bern-based Risklick offers AI-driven solutions for developing clinical trial protocols and US company iFactory uses AI to flag quality problems and improve productivity in drug manufacturing.

Bigger tech companies like Anthropic or Microsoft that are trying to target pharma with tools also need people who understand the industry’s science, regulatory and business processes. Anthropic recently listed 16 roles related to life-sciences across legal, computational, and sales teams. Although they are just a fraction of the nearly 600 open positions on its careers page and most are US-based, they offer highly competitive salaries.

Long-term potential

Just how significant the crossover of pharma talent into AI will become is hard to estimate. The numbers are still fairly small in Switzerland and globally, said Maurice Thornton who heads the Zurich-based life science recruitment agency headcount AG.

“What we see more of is AI companies bringing on higher level, very experienced pharma people to join their boards or as advisors to help build out their healthcare business,” he said. One example is Vas Narasimhan, the CEO of Novartis, who joined the board of Anthropic in April 2026.

The scale of opportunities in the long-term depends on the endgame for AI companies, said Christian Hein, previously vice president of digital transformation at Novartis and now an independent advisor on AI in life sciences and healthcare.  

“It isn’t clear yet whether AI-native drug discovery companies stay platforms or become more traditional biotechs with their own pipelines,” said Hein. “If it is the latter, there are likely to be more people moving from pharma into these companies.”

He is sceptical that the large frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic will become direct competitors to pharmaceutical companies when it comes to attracting talent.

“The moment you get into clinical development, it’s quite a different business model from the technology and software market,” he said. “I see the big AI labs much more as enablers and accelerators of science and pharma processes.”

Thornton agrees. He expects more partnerships between pharma and AI companies and with that, more cross-pollination of talent. For traditional pharma hubs like Switzerland, this makes it even more important to attract AI talent.

The country already has an advantage – Swiss federal institutes of technology, ETH Zurich and EPFL in Lausanne, are some of the best training grounds for AI talent. “The marriage of pharma and AI in this country is a huge opportunity,” said Thornton.

Edited by Nerys Avery/vm/gw