Novo Nordisk is expanding its use of AWS artificial intelligence tools across drug discovery, including AI agents for target identification, therapy design, and research workflows.
Under the agreement announced recently, AWS will become Novo Nordisk’s preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner. The companies have also created a co-innovation hub at Novo Nordisk’s existing London facility, where AWS engineers and Novo Nordisk scientists will work directly with the pharmaceutical company’s data and research insights.
The London hub will bring Novo Nordisk R&D staff together with AWS engineers, AI specialists, applied scientists, and professional services teams. AWS said the arrangement is intended to reduce handoffs between computational analysis and laboratory research as potential drug candidates move through early development.
Thilde Hummel Bøgebjerg, executive vice president of Enterprise IT & Quality at Novo Nordisk, said the partnership combines AI technology with the company’s scientific expertise.
“AI has the potential to transform how we discover, develop and deliver medicines, but real impact comes from combining advanced technology with deep scientific expertise and a clear focus on patients,” Bøgebjerg said.
The companies said the hub is intended to shorten the path from identifying a drug target to a first human dose. The partnership will combine Novo Nordisk’s research in chronic diseases with AWS cloud infrastructure, AI services, and life sciences technologies.
Novo Nordisk already uses AWS technology across internal AI workloads. According to an AWS case study, more than 25,000 Novo Nordisk employees have used a generative AI platform built on Amazon Bedrock to create chatbots covering more than 2,500 use cases.
Those applications include information retrieval and document drafting across non-regulated processes. One of the larger deployments uses a collection of about 140,000 documents and processes more than 26,000 prompts each month, according to AWS.
Novo Nordisk has also applied generative AI to clinical-study documentation. AWS said a system using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 through Amazon Bedrock reduced the time required to generate some clinical documentation by more than 90%.
According to the AWS case study, work that previously involved 40 to 50 people and could take as long as 15 weeks was reduced to minutes for a team of three. Medical professionals continue to review and validate the generated material.
The new agreement moves that use of generative AI further into drug research. One of the technologies involved is Amazon Bio Discovery, which is designed to support computational biology and drug development using AI models and agents.
AWS said Bio Discovery provides researchers with access to more than 40 biological AI models. AI agents can be used to select and coordinate models for different research tasks, while organisations can also combine AWS-hosted models with their own proprietary models in multi-step workflows.