Novo Nordisk and AWS: AI Revolutionizes Drug Discovery

A Strategic Collaboration for Health Innovation

Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk has announced an enhanced collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to integrate artificial intelligence into its drug discovery processes. This initiative aims to leverage advanced AI capabilities to identify new therapeutic targets, design innovative treatments, and optimize research workflows.

As part of this agreement, AWS becomes Novo Nordisk's preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner. A co-innovation hub has been established at Novo Nordisk's facilities in London, where AWS engineers work closely with the pharmaceutical company's scientists to harness research data and insights.

A Co-Innovation Hub in London

The London hub is designed to bring together Novo Nordisk's research and development teams with AWS AI experts. This collaboration aims to reduce the time between computational analysis and laboratory research, thereby accelerating the development of drug candidates.

Thilde Hummel Bøgebjerg, Executive Vice President of Enterprise IT and Quality at Novo Nordisk, emphasizes that the real impact of AI lies in combining advanced technology with deep scientific expertise, while maintaining a clear focus on patients.

Accelerating Research Processes

The primary goal of the hub is to shorten the time between identifying a drug target and administering the first dose to a patient. By combining Novo Nordisk's research on chronic diseases with AWS's cloud infrastructure, the two companies hope to transform drug discovery processes.

AI at the Heart of Research Workflows

Novo Nordisk is already utilizing AWS technology in its internal operations. According to an AWS case study, over 25,000 Novo Nordisk employees have used a generative AI platform based on Amazon Bedrock to create chatbots covering more than 2,500 use cases.

These applications include information retrieval and document drafting for non-regulated processes. One major deployment handles approximately 140,000 documents and manages over 26,000 queries each month.

Reducing Clinical Documentation Time

Generative AI has also been applied to the documentation of clinical studies. A system using Claude 3.5 from Anthropic via Amazon Bedrock has reduced the time required to generate certain clinical documents by over 90%.

Work that previously required 40 to 50 people and up to 15 weeks has been reduced to a few minutes for a team of three, although healthcare professionals continue to validate the generated material.

Extending Generative AI

The new agreement pushes the use of generative AI further into drug research. Amazon Bio Discovery, a key technology, supports computational biology and drug development using AI models and agents.

AWS provides researchers access to over 40 AI biological models. These agents can select and coordinate models for different research tasks, allowing organizations to combine AWS models with their proprietary models.

Practical Applications of AI

Novo Nordisk plans to use these technologies to identify potential drug targets, design therapies, and analyze biological information. The platform can also generate and rank drug candidates before their synthesis and laboratory testing.

Experimental results are then integrated into the computational workflow for in-depth analysis and model adjustment, thereby linking computational design to physical testing.

Utilizing Amazon Bedrock

Novo Nordisk will also use Amazon Bedrock to develop AI applications capable of processing clinical, genomic, and imaging datasets. This integration aims to allow early research results to influence the design of clinical trials.

Deploying AI Agents with AgentCore

Another part of the agreement concerns Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, AWS's infrastructure for deploying and operating AI agents. AgentCore enables agents to work across enterprise data and execute multi-step workflows.

Although Novo Nordisk has not specified which AgentCore functions will be used, the company plans to deploy this technology in its research and operational processes.

A Partnership Focused on Innovation

Dan Sheeran, Vice President and General Manager of Health and Life Sciences at AWS, highlighted that the partnership focuses on applying agent-based AI in drug discovery, eliminating traditional bottlenecks.

Previous Bedrock deployments by Novo Nordisk were primarily focused on generative AI applications for employees. The new agreement extends the use of AWS AI tools into scientific and operational workflows.

An Expanded Collaboration with AWS

Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, stated that the companies will use the technology to shorten drug discovery timelines and process complex datasets.

AWS engineers will work directly with Novo Nordisk teams on systems developed under the partnership, integrating AWS technical staff with clients for AI projects.

A Partnership Beyond Drug Discovery

The agreement is part of a broader relationship between Novo Nordisk and Amazon, which also includes Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Ads, and One Medical.

AWS has also announced AI collaborations for life sciences with Flagship Pioneering and Johnson & Johnson in 2026.

Other AI Initiatives by Novo Nordisk

Novo Nordisk is also pursuing AI projects outside of AWS, collaborating with OpenAI to deploy artificial intelligence in drug discovery, manufacturing, and business operations.

The company is also utilizing Denmark's Gefion supercomputer for workloads including AI model development and other data-intensive scientific research.

Novo Nordisk CEO Mike Doustdar stated that the partnership with AWS aims to accelerate drug discovery and expand the use of AI in the company's work on chronic diseases.