Novo Nordisk is expanding its use of artificial intelligence and Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology across drug discovery, with a focus on AI agents for identifying drug targets, designing therapies, and streamlining research workflows.
Under a newly announced agreement, AWS will become Novo Nordisk’s preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner. The companies are also establishing a co-innovation hub at Novo Nordisk’s existing facility in London, bringing AWS engineers and pharmaceutical researchers together to develop AI-powered systems.
The initiative combines Novo Nordisk’s expertise in chronic diseases with AWS cloud infrastructure, AI services, and life sciences technologies. The companies aim to reduce delays between computational research and laboratory testing and ultimately shorten the time required to move potential treatments toward human trials.
Novo Nordisk and AWS Establish AI Research Hub
The London co-innovation hub will bring together Novo Nordisk research and development teams with AWS engineers, AI specialists, applied scientists, and professional services experts.
AWS said the arrangement is intended to reduce handoffs between computational analysis and laboratory research as potential drug candidates progress through early development.
Thilde Hummel Bøgebjerg, executive vice president of Enterprise IT & Quality at Novo Nordisk, said combining advanced AI capabilities with pharmaceutical expertise could help accelerate the development of new medicines.
The companies said the hub will focus on shortening the journey from identifying a potential drug target to delivering a first dose to a human participant.
AI Moves Deeper Into Novo Nordisk Research
Novo Nordisk already uses AWS technology for a range of internal AI applications.
According to an AWS case study, more than 25,000 Novo Nordisk employees have used a generative AI platform built with Amazon Bedrock. The platform supports more than 2,500 use cases, including information retrieval and document creation for non-regulated processes.
One major deployment reportedly contains approximately 140,000 documents and handles more than 26,000 prompts each month.
The pharmaceutical company 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 needed to produce certain clinical documents by more than 90%.
Tasks that previously required teams of 40 to 50 people and could take up to 15 weeks were reportedly reduced to minutes for a team of three. Medical professionals remain responsible for reviewing and validating the AI-generated material.
The latest partnership takes these AI capabilities further into scientific research and drug development.