Amgen forges ahead with generative AI to expedite advanced therapies

California-based biotechnology pioneer Amgen has announced an expanded collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to utilise generative artificial intelligence in streamlining the discovery, development and manufacturing of innovative medicines. Leveraging AWS’s formidable infrastructure and services, Amgen aims to construct an insightful digital analytics platform to optimise operations and sustainability at its state-of-the-art packaging facility opening next year in Ohio.

Implementing Amazon’s SageMaker machine learning service, the facility’s connected digital system will garner manifold manufacturing data daily to reduce manual oversight and improve productivity and safety via predictive AI. By integrating real-time performance metrics with machine learning models, Amgen can potentially predict and avert equipment failures, decreasing downtime and unlocking extra manufacturing capacity.

“Generative AI is already bettering our clinical trial planning and execution,” explained Amgen’s CIO, Mike Zahigian. “Working closely with AWS’s machine learning experts allows us to adopt these solutions rapidly across research, development and operations.”

The Future of Drug Development

Specifically, Amgen will leverage generative AI to accelerate the discovery of new molecular entities and optimise clinical trial design. Generative models can analyse vast databases of published research to generate novel drug candidate structures and predict their therapeutic viability. These models can also refine trial parameters like patient recruitment criteria and endpoint selection to enable leaner, faster trials.

By combining human expertise with AI-generated insights, Amgen can condense the average 10-year therapeutic development timeline and get transformative medicines to patients faster.

Optimising Manufacturing and Supply Chains

The new Ohio facility will also showcase how AI and cloud computing can make drug production more agile and sustainable. The predictive maintenance functionality enabled by the AWS platform will reduce factory downtimes and energy waste, while improving supply chain resilience.

As Amgen expands its global manufacturing footprint, generative supply chain models can guide the optimal geographic placement and inventory levels of production hubs to balance operation costs, emissions and patient access.

Healthcare’s Next Technological Frontier

“Our life sciences clients recognise generative AI’s vast potential in enabling efficiencies and advancement across healthcare,” commented Dr Matt Wood, AWS’s Vice President of Technology. “Blending AWS’s reinforced ML capabilities with Amgen’s industry leading innovation, we aim to fast-track transformative medicines to improve patient outcomes.”

From clinical trials to cloud computing, Amgen’s expanded alliance with AWS represents the next frontier of technological innovation in the biopharma sphere. As computational power and datasets grow exponentially, generative AI promises to revolutionise how drugs are discovered, tested and supplied to transform patient outcomes worldwide.

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