AWS Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

How Accenture and AWS are upgrading Merck’s IT and drug discovery R&D engine

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Historically, the pharma sector has exhibited a degree of caution in adopting emerging technologies such as cloud computing and AI, given the sector’s stringent regulatory requirements, data security concerns, and the complexities involved in integrating new systems into legacy processes.

The situation is beginning to shift considerably with the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, acting as a catalyst, compelling many Big Pharma companies to accelerate their digital initiatives. Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis, AstraZeneca, and other Big Pharma companies have unveiled ambitious initiatives tapping cloud computing and AI technologies, aiming to streamline various aspects of drug discovery and development.

Inside the Accenture-AWS-Merck pharma alliance

For instance, Merck in 2021 forged an alliance with Accenture and AWS to update its IT infrastructure and facilitate advanced drug discover…

Eversana’s AWS alliance aims to cut red tape in pharma regulatory paperwork

In July, the life sciences services company Eversana revealed it was partnering with AWS to tap generative AI (gen AI) for pharma and other life science customers. It aimed to “pharmatize” gen AI, as the company put it then. Now, the company has revealed the first technology from that partnership – a regulatory review automation system using natural language processing and gen AI services on the AWS platform.

To arrive at its first area of focus, the company considered use cases that were “really practical,” offering “great opportunities for efficiency gains,” but without high risk to patients or healthcare professionals, said Scott Snyder, Eversana’s chief digital officer. The company used a version of the three R’s — responsibility, reliability and ROI. The first chiefly involves “making sure you really understand this is something you’re going to take ownership of, be accountable for, and do it in the right way,” Snyder said. Eversana …

AWS expands collaborations with Amgen and Merck to advance AI in drug discovery and manufacturing

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At its annual re:Invent event, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced expanded alliances with two leading drug developers, Amgen and Merck, to create generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies aimed at accelerating drug discovery and increasing efficiencies in manufacturing processes.

Merck has been working with AWS and Accenture for several years whereas Amgen and AWS have collaborated for more than a decade.

Reflecting on AWS’s presence in the life sciences, Dan Sheeran, general manager of healthcare and life sciences at AWS, noted the company works with thousands of global healthcare and life sciences customers, including nine of the top 10 pharma companies.

“Healthcare and life sciences organizations are increasingly turning to AWS and technology as a business differentiator—especially with the explosion of generative AI,” Sheeran said. “Our pharma c…

Eversana partners with AWS to accelerate generative AI in pharma

Life sciences commercial services company Eversana is one of the latest to throw its hat into the generative AI ring. Tapping a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Everasana is focusing on developing generative AI technologies in the pharmaceutical industry.

Also this month, the startup Synthetica Bio announced it would use generative AI to boost drug discovery innovation while Nvidia announced it would invest $50 million in the biotech Recursion to support its AI drug discovery efforts. Earlier this year, Nvidia debuted a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery known as BioNemo.

Eversana’s approach to generative AI in pharma

Eversana aims to ‘pharmatise’ AI. The company’s chief digital officer Scott Snyder explains: “When we talk about pharmatising, it’s overlaying all of the unique needs, requirements, and goals of pharma, but layering it on to the innovation capability of generative AI.”…

A deep dive into AWS’s strategy with generative AI and ML in life sciences

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The AI market is witnessing meteoric growth, with projections hinting at a potentially staggering increase over the next decade. Against this backdrop of rapid AI evolution, we recently spoke with Tehsin Syed, general manager of AWS Health. Syed shared that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing growing interest from Big Pharma firms. “Nine of the top 10 pharma companies in the world have a large majority of the workloads running on AWS,” Syed said. The AWS cloud hosts more than 100,000 customers across industries.

AWS aims to provide a broad and deep range of AI services and takes an end-to-end approach to AI that includes infrastructure, software, hardware and services.In an increasingly competitive AI landscape, AWS recently launched a $100 million initiative, the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, to accelerate enterprise generative AI adoption. As Syed put it, “AWS has a pe…

Working backwards: AWS’s strategy for pharma’s cloud-enabled transformation

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The meteoric rise of the AI sector is hard to fathom. Projections from Precedence Research suggest that the global AI market could balloon by 2600% from 2022 to 2032, hitting $1.87 trillion — an annual growth rate of 39%.

In pharma, AI and data science demand is surging though overall growth is sluggish. Despite advances such as the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, the broader sector has struggled to keep up with the overall stock market. But the future could tell a different story. McKinsey projects that the pharma and medical products sector could gain 9% in EBITDA from cloud computing.

To tap this potential, cloud vendors are allying with pharma companies. “Nine of the top 10 pharma companies in the world have a large majority of the workloads running on AWS,” noted Tehsin Syed, general manager of AWS Health. These workloads encompass diverse areas including IT infras…

The Brain Knowledge Platform aims to illumine the brain’s cellular universe

Image from the Brain Explorer 2 software, a desktop application that enables users to interactively explore human brain anatomy and gene expression data in 3D. [Allen Institute for Brain Science]

Despite substantial progress in brain research, our understanding of the human brain remains limited. “We really don’t understand the fine circuitry of the brain — even in a relatively simple organism like a mouse,” confessed Ed Lein, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. But AI in neuroscience research promises to change the game, ushering our understanding of the brain into a new era.

“What’s been happening for quite a while now is a desire to really try to understand the basic architecture of the brain better,” Lein said. And what’s become quite clear is that the basic unit of the brain is the cell.” So we need to describe the brain at the cellular level.&…

The cloud is transforming medtech: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, J&J, Philips and GE Healthcare leaders explain

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Leaders in medtech and cloud computing discuss payoffs and potential in device connectivity, product development and cross-industry partnerships.

If knowledge is power, that power comes from a steady stream of information, and we know there’s no shortage of that in healthcare.

The challenge has long been how to capture that information, store it, analyze it and deploy it to improve medical product design, manufacturing and the health of patients.

Then came the cloud, and with it a host of acronyms: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and — following the same convention — software as a medical device (SaMD).

Over the past few months, Medical Design & Outsourcing connected with leaders in medtech and cloud computing, including the three largest providers of cloud computing services: Amazon (Nasda…

Amazon Web Services is powering medtech innovation: Its chief medical officer explains

It doesn’t get any bigger than Amazon in the world of cloud computing.

Dr. Taha Kass-Hout is the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at Amazon Web Services [Photo courtesy of Amazon]The Amazon Web Services cloud computing business at Seattle-based Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is the largest player in the industry, with control of about a third of the market and a significant lead over cloud competitors Microsoft and Google.

Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at AWS, spoke with Medical Design & Outsourcing as part of an ongoing series of conversations about cloud computing’s contributions to medtech and the potential ahead.

“The future is bright for anyone who’s trying to solve problems in healthcare and life science globally,” he said.

Get the full story at our sister site, Medical Design & Outsourcing.

An Amazon cloud conversation with AWS Chief Medical Officer Taha Kass-Hout

Taha Kass-Hout is the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at Amazon Web Services [Photo courtesy of Amazon]

It doesn’t get any bigger than Amazon in the world of cloud computing.

The Amazon Web Services cloud computing business at Seattle-based Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is the largest player in the industry, with control of about a third of the market and a significant lead over cloud competitors Microsoft and Google.

Taha Kass-Hout, the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at AWS, spoke with Medical Design & Outsourcing as part of an ongoing series of conversations about cloud computing’s contributions to medtech and the potential ahead.

“The future is bright for anyone who’s trying to solve problems in healthcare and life science globally,” he said.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

MDO: What d…

AWS and pharma heavyweights join forces on AI-based drug discovery lab

The goal of using AI to transform drug discovery and development may not be novel. But a recent alliance is unique in both the stature of companies belonging to it and its choice of an innovation model.

Big Pharma firms AstraZeneca (LON:AZN), Merck KGaA (ETR: MRK), Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and Teva (NYSE:TEVA) will partner with Amazon Web Services Inc. (NSDQ:AMZN) and the Israel Biotech Fund (IBF) on what they term a “first-of-its-kind innovation lab” known as AION Labs.

“The launch of AION Labs will provide an opportunity for the healthcare and life sciences industry to uncover new ways to reduce the time and cost for discovery, facilitate open collaboration and interoperability, and ultimately improve patients’ health outcomes,” said Dan Sheeran, director of healthcare and life sciences at Amazon Web Services, in a statement.

AION Labs has also formed a strategic partnership with the biomedical research institute BioMed X (Heidelberg, Germany).

The lab…

Using RVI to prevent contamination and maintain purity of pharmaceuticals

How remote visual inspection (RVI) can help pharma companies prevent contamination and maintain product-line purity requirements.

Drug manufacturers use a combination of indirect and direct quality control (QC) techniques to prevent contamination throughout the production line. Image courtesy of Olympus

Bacterial or foreign-particle contamination in production-line equipment can cause serious health issues for consumers and shake public confidence in the industry.

Strict purity and contamination control of pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities is required under various international standards, such as ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), AWS (American Welding Society) and local regulatory authorities such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Get the full story from our sister site, Pharmaceutical Processing World.