Pfizer teams up with AWS to expedite drug discovery, development processes

As part of the Pfizer Amazon Collaboration Team (PACT) initiative, AWS is working with the drugmaker to develop a prototype solution for detecting abnormal data points in its drug product continuous clinical manufacturing platform for solid, oral-dose medicines.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working with drugmaker Pfizer to create innovative, cloud-based solutions to expedite the processes for drug discovery and development and evaluate their potential health benefit for patients globally.

Commenting on this collaboration, Kathrin Renz, Vice President of Business Development and Industries at Amazon Web Services, Inc., said, "AWS's breadth and depth of cloud capabilities help support Pfizer's teams through secure, novel research methods as they work to optimize drug development and clinical manufacturing processes. We're proud to work with Pfizer and lend our deep domain expertise to assist in developing solutions that could significantly improve the lives of patients globally."

As part of the Pfizer Amazon Collaboration Team (PACT) initiative, AWS is working with the drugmaker to develop a prototype solution for detecting abnormal data points in its drug product continuous clinical manufacturing platform for solid, oral-dose medicines. The solution uses multiple AWS services including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Lookout for Equipment, Amazon Lookout for Metrics and Amazon QuickSight.

In a joint press release, AWS and Pfizer said that the machine learning models used in the prototype solution were able to provide early warnings for alarms with minimal false positives and direct users to the relevant signals, allowing the drugmaker to detect anomalies as they occur, predict maintenance needs, and reduce potential equipment downtime.

Additionally, scientists at Pfizer will also team up with AWS healthcare and life sciences professionals to explore how researchers in the former's Pharmaceutical Sciences Small Molecules teams can extract and mine information from legacy documents by leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning services.

Working closely with AWS experts in machine learning and analytics, we aim to provide our scientists and researchers with the insights they need to help deliver medical breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.

Andrew McKillop, Vice President of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Worldwide Research, Development, and Medical at Pfizer.