Novo Nordisk and AWS Expand Agentic AI Use Across Drug Discovery

 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.

Amazon Bio Discovery Targets Drug Development

A key technology involved in the partnership is Amazon Bio Discovery, an AI service designed to support computational biology and drug-development workflows.

AWS says the platform provides access to more than 40 biological AI models. Researchers can use AI agents to select and coordinate different models for specific research tasks.

Organisations can also combine models hosted by AWS with proprietary models to create multi-step computational workflows.

Novo Nordisk plans to use the technology for several stages of drug discovery, including identifying potential drug targets, designing therapies, and analysing biological data.

The platform can generate and rank potential drug candidates before selected compounds are sent for laboratory synthesis and testing.

Results from those physical experiments can then be returned to the computational workflow for additional analysis and model refinement.

This creates a feedback loop between computer-based drug design and laboratory experiments, potentially allowing researchers to test and improve candidate treatments more efficiently.

AI to Connect Clinical, Genomic and Imaging Data

Novo Nordisk also plans to use Amazon Bedrock to develop AI applications capable of working across clinical, genomic, and medical imaging datasets.

Connecting these different categories of information could allow insights from early-stage research to influence later stages of development, including clinical-trial planning.

The approach could give researchers a more integrated view of biological and clinical information, potentially helping them identify patterns that are difficult to detect when datasets are analysed separately.

Novo Nordisk Expands Use of AI Agents

Another major component of the agreement is Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, AWS infrastructure designed to help organisations deploy and operate AI agents.

AgentCore allows AI agents to interact with enterprise data, connect with existing systems, and perform multi-step tasks.

Novo Nordisk has not disclosed the specific AgentCore capabilities it will use in individual research projects. However, the company said it plans to introduce the technology across both research and operational workflows.

Dan Sheeran, vice president and general manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, said the partnership is aimed at using agentic AI to remove bottlenecks throughout drug discovery rather than simply analysing those challenges.

The expanded relationship represents a shift from Novo Nordisk’s earlier AWS deployments, which were primarily focused on employee-facing generative AI applications, toward scientific workflows directly connected to drug development.

AWS Engineers to Work Directly With Novo Nordisk Teams

AWS Forward Deployed Engineers will work alongside Novo Nordisk teams on systems created through the partnership.

The programme places AWS technical specialists directly within customer projects, allowing teams to develop and deploy AI systems tailored to specific business and research requirements.

AWS CEO Matt Garman said the companies aim to use AI to accelerate drug discovery, analyse complex scientific datasets, and apply research findings across different therapeutic areas.

The partnership builds on a broader commercial relationship between Novo Nordisk and Amazon that includes services such as Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Ads, and One Medical.

Novo Nordisk Pursues AI Beyond AWS

Novo Nordisk’s AI strategy extends beyond its partnership with AWS.

The company has also worked with OpenAI on applying artificial intelligence to areas including drug discovery, manufacturing, and commercial operations.

Novo Nordisk is additionally using Denmark’s Gefion supercomputer for workloads involving AI model development and other data-intensive scientific research.

The company’s expanding partnerships reflect the growing role of AI and high-performance computing in pharmaceutical research.

AWS has separately announced life-sciences AI collaborations with companies and organisations including Flagship Pioneering and Johnson & Johnson.

AI Could Reshape the Drug Discovery Pipeline

The partnership between Novo Nordisk and AWS reflects a broader pharmaceutical-industry push to use AI throughout the drug development process.

By combining AI agents, biological foundation models, cloud computing, proprietary research data, and laboratory experiments, Novo Nordisk aims to create more connected research workflows.

The ultimate objective is to accelerate the identification and testing of potential treatments for chronic diseases while reducing bottlenecks in early-stage drug discovery.

Novo Nordisk CEO Mike Doustdar said the AWS partnership is intended to speed up drug discovery and broaden the use of AI across the company’s work on chronic diseases.