As part of its ongoing mission to accelerate drug development with help from artificial intelligence (AI), Danish drug maker, Novo Nordisk, is partnering Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch a new AI “co-innovation” hub in London.
According to the companies, under the partnership, AWS will provide the pharmaceutical maker’s needed cloud as well as its strategic AI partner. At the hub, AWS engineers, AI experts and applied scientists will work with Novo Nordisk research and development teams to increase productivity and speed up the time it takes to bring future drug innovations to market, the companies said.
“Partnering with AWS is about making AI a driver of innovation across Novo Nordisk,” said Mike Doustdar, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk in a statement. The combination of the pharmaceutical firm’s scientific expertise with AWS’ life sciences AI tools in a new dedicated co-innovation hub within an existing Novo Nordisk facility will help propel drug discovery “for people living with serious chronic diseases,” Doustdar said.
The new seven-year pact between the two companies expands an existing collaboration that Novo Nordisk said is helping to reduce clinical documentation time and boost productivity of more than 25,000 employees.
Under the new agreement, Novo Nordisk is using AWS tools and services such as Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock “to identify drug targets, design new therapies faster and connect genomic, imaging and clinical data so that breakthroughs in early research can shape clinical trial design,” the pharmaceutical maker said. Novo Nordisk will also use Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to drive efficiencies across its operations through AI agents, the drug maker said.
“Agents will be able to perform certain actions. These actions will be restricted by agent governance and guardrails established by Novo Nordisk, and automated within the AI platform and adapted to the risk of the tasks being performed,” a Novo Nordisk spokesperson told ISMG in a statement.
As stipulated in the agreement, Novo Nordisk will control its data and all use cases while data handling will follow approved security, privacy and data governance standards, including EU residency where required. “Direct identifiable patient information or other types of sensitive personal information will not be shared for use outside approved Novo Nordisk purposes. No Novo Nordisk data will be used to train large language models.”
