Novo Nordisk partners Amazon on London AI hub
Novo Nordisk has joined forces with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a project that will lead to the creation of an AI co-innovation hub in London, boosting the UK's standing as a hub for AI-powered drug discovery.
The alliance – which makes AWS Novo Nordisk's primary cloud provider and strategic AI partner – will bring together AWS engineers, AI specialists, and applied scientists alongside Novo Nordisk's R&D teams to "compress the path from drug target to first human dose."
The new hub will be set up using AWS' recently launched Forward Deployed Engineering organisation, a $1 billion drive to embed engineers, scientists, and strategists in the tech giant's customers to co-develop agentic AI solutions and slash deployment times from months to days.
The announcement is a fillip to the UK's aspirations in this area, coming after changes at Google DeepMind – namely, the decision by Nobel Prize-winning chief executive Demis Hassabis to step down and become chair and chief scientist at parent Alphabet – could signal a shift in the company's focus towards the US under new leader Koray Kavukcuoglu, who is based in Silicon Valley.
Under the terms of the partnership with AWS, Novo Nordisk will use AI tools such as Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock to identify drug targets, design new medicines, and connect genomic, imaging, and clinical data. The hope is that this will translate to discoveries in early research that can directly inform the design of clinical trials and improve the chances of success.
Novo Nordisk has had a longstanding working relationship with AWS, which it says has already resulted in successful AI deployments that have reduced clinical documentation time and boosted productivity, but this strategic-level agreement takes their partnership to a higher level.
The announcement comes as Novo Nordisk is trying to rejuvenate its pipeline and diversify its focus further beyond its main focus on diabetes and obesity, where it has been losing ground to Eli Lilly. In the last couple of weeks, those efforts have been undermined by disappointing clinical results with weight-loss candidate monlunabant and ziltivekimab for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) and chronic kidney disease (CKD).
"Partnering with AWS is about making AI a driver of innovation across Novo Nordisk," said Mike Doustdar, Novo Nordisk's chief executive.
"By combining our scientific expertise with AWS' tools and purpose-built services for the life sciences industry, while also creating a dedicated co-innovation hub within our existing facility in London, we are accelerating discovery and developing responsible AI solutions that will create real progress for people living with serious chronic diseases."
Photo by David Monaghan on Unsplash
