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Novartis Social Business 
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About SMS for Life 2.0:
SMS for Life is a Roll Back Malaria Partnership initiative, led by Novartis, with the purpose of developing and helping countries implement new innovative solutions to the long-standing problem of medicine stock-outs at the remote health facility level in order to significantly improve patient access to healthcare commodities in developing countries.
The program was launched in 2009 by the Novartis Malaria Initiative to manage stock-outs of malaria medicines in sub-Saharan countries. A new enhanced version of this award-winning program, called SMS for Life 2.0, now uses smartphones and tablet computers.
The program allows public healthcare facilities to monitor stock levels of essential medicines such as antimalarials, HIV treatments, and vaccines. Further, it can and will be extended to treatments against noncommunicable diseases. The system sends notifications to district medical officers responsible for treatment availability when stock levels are low, helping to avoid stock-outs. Tablet computers also allow for disease monitoring by supporting data collection of basic disease parameters in line with a country’s needs. They can also be used to deliver high-quality training to healthcare workers by making eLearning modules available on demand.  

About the Novartis Malaria Initiative:
The Novartis Malaria Initiative is committed to drive research, development and access to novel drugs to eliminate malaria. It is one of the pharmaceutical industry’s largest access-to-medicine programs. Since 2001, the initiative has delivered more than 800 million treatments without profit, including over 300 million dispersible pediatric treatments, mostly to the public sector of malaria-endemic countries. 

Novartis has a long heritage in antimalarial drug development. Coartem®, the first fixed-dose Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT), was launched in 1999. ACTs are the current standard of care in malaria treatment. Currently, Novartis leads two of the four most advanced malaria development programs worldwide, with two potential antimalarial therapies in Phase II clinical trials (KAF156 and KAE609). Both are new classes of compounds that treat malaria in different ways from current therapies, and could help combat growing resistance to existing artemisinin-based combination therapies. 

The Novartis Malaria Initiative is integrated in Novartis Social Business, a unit which includes Novartis Access and the Novartis Healthy Family programs. This unit is operationally managed by Sandoz, the Novartis generics and biosimilars division.

About Novartis:
Novartis (www.Novartis.com) provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis offers a diversified portfolio to best meet these needs: innovative medicines, eye care and cost-saving generic pharmaceuticals. Novartis is the only global company with leading positions in these areas. In 2015, the Group achieved net sales of USD 49.4 billion, while R&D throughout the Group amounted to approximately USD 8.9 billion (USD 8.7 billion excluding impairment and amortization charges). Novartis Group companies employ approximately 118,000 full-time-equivalent associates. Novartis products are available in more than 180 countries around the world. For more information, please visit www.Novartis.com.

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Disclaimer:
This press release contains expressed or implied forward-looking statements, including statements that can be identified by terminology such as “to accelerate,” “will,” “confident,” “continues to,” “potential,” “next-generation,” “to further drive,” “committed,” “pipeline,” “could,” “would,” or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements reflect the current views of the Group regarding future events, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such statements. These expectations could be affected by, among other things, risks and factors referred to in the Risk Factors section of Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update it in the future.