Novo Nordisk, AWS Launch AI Co-Innovation Hub in London for Drug Discovery

Under the expanded agreement, AWS will become Novo Nordisk’s preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner for drug discovery, while teams from both companies will work together on AI applications and technology infrastructure.

Novo Nordisk and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are expanding their partnership to establish an AI co-innovation hub in London focused on accelerating drug discovery. Under the expanded agreement, AWS will become Novo Nordisk’s preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner for drug discovery, while teams from both companies will work together on AI applications and technology infrastructure.

The hub will bring AWS engineers, AI specialists and applied scientists together with Novo Nordisk’s research and development teams. The collaboration will focus on applying AI to areas including target identification, drug development and research workflows.

Novo Nordisk plans to use Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock to analyze genomic, imaging and clinical datasets, identify potential drug targets and support the development of new therapies. Insights generated during early-stage research will also be used to inform clinical trial design.

The pharma company will additionally use Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to deploy AI agents designed to automate workflows and improve operational efficiency across research activities.

Dan Sheeran, vice president and general manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, said the expanded partnership would focus on addressing challenges across drug discovery using agentic AI. He said the companies are also expanding their use of AWS applications, including Amazon Bio Discovery, which is designed to help scientists apply AI to research and connect computational drug design with laboratory testing.

The expanded AWS partnership follows Novo Nordisk’s separate agreement with OpenAI announced in April. Under that partnership, Novo Nordisk said OpenAI’s AI capabilities would be used across its global operations, including drug discovery, analysis of complex datasets, identification of drug candidates, manufacturing and supply chain operations.

The development comes as pharmaceutical companies increase investments in AI infrastructure and co-innovation models. In January, Eli Lilly announced plans to partner with NVIDIA on an AI co-innovation lab in San Francisco, with an investment of up to $1 billion over five years focused on drug discovery.

Bristol Myers Squibb has also expanded its AI partnerships, announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA in July to deploy advanced AI computing infrastructure and an agreement with Anthropic in May to use Claude across research, clinical development, manufacturing and other functions.

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