Nikolina Nakic | Head of Digital Biology, Artificial Intelligence & Digital Innovation
Novo Nordisk

Nikolina is a senior scientific leader in pharma R&D, currently leading the global Digital Biology organisation within AI & Data Innovation at Novo Nordisk. Her work spans early target discovery, translational evidence generation and clinical genomics, with a focus on applying biology-led AI to improve R&D decision-making - both to advance internal assets and to assess external innovation opportunities. Her work focuses on translating multimodal biological data into mechanistic insight, increasing confidence in early R&D decisions and enabling more capital-efficient portfolio choices. Nikolina has built and led interdisciplinary teams across Europe, the UK, the US and Asia. Prior to joining Novo Nordisk, she held senior computational biology roles at GSK, where she was accountable for scaling computational capabilities and integrating genetics and multi-omics into AI-ready resources for target discovery and translation. She also served as GSK Science Lead for Open Targets, helping translate scientific strategy into collaborative projects with external academic and industry partners. Her academic background includes training in molecular biology, genetics and computational genomics at IDIBAPS in Barcelona and Imperial College London, where she also held the position of Honorary Lecturer in Genomic Medicine.