AWS for Industries
Novo Nordisk selects AWS as strategic partner to accelerate drug discovery with AI
Novo Nordisk, a leading global healthcare company, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate drug discovery and modernize operations through AI and cloud technologies. The agreement establishes AWS as Novo Nordisk’s preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner, bringing together Novo Nordisk’s deep therapeutic expertise across serious chronic diseases with AWS’s cloud and AI services, secure infrastructure, and purpose-built life sciences technologies.
The partnership deepens a broader relationship between Novo Nordisk and Amazon. Novo Nordisk already collaborates with Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Ads, and Amazon One Medical to transform how therapies are marketed and delivered to patients. This strategic agreement with AWS adds the technology and AI foundation that will power Novo Nordisk’s next generation of scientific discovery and operational efficiency across its global workforce of more than 66,700 people in 80 countries.
Figure 1: Novo Nordisk and AWS co-branded logo
Bringing scientists and engineers together, under one roof
Drug discovery is inherently cross-disciplinary, yet the teams involved often work in silos. Scientists generate hypotheses, engineers build computational tools to test them, and data specialists translate results into clinical decisions. When these groups operate separately, the result is handoff delays, context loss, and insights that take weeks to move from one team to the next.
Novo Nordisk and AWS are addressing this directly through a co-innovation hub within Novo Nordisk’s King’s Cross facility in London. The hub brings together Novo Nordisk’s research and development teams with engineers, AI specialists, and applied scientists from AWS’s Forward Deployed Engineering team and AWS Professional Services organization. The goal is to compress the path from drug target to first human dose by eliminating the gaps between scientific insight and technical execution.
In practice, this means that when an AI-driven process surfaces a new insight about a candidate molecule, the engineers who built the model and the research leaders who understand the clinical implications are in the same room. Decisions happen in real time. Experimental designs are refined on the spot. Nothing gets lost in translation between a computational prediction and the next physical experiment.
“AI has the potential to transform how we discover, develop and deliver medicines, but real impact comes from combining advanced technology with deep scientific expertise and a clear focus on patients,” said Thilde Hummel Bøgebjerg, Executive Vice President, Enterprise IT & Quality, Novo Nordisk. “By expanding our partnership with AWS, we are creating an environment where our scientists, engineers and technology teams can co-innovate, scale responsibly and accelerate the journey from scientific insight to meaningful outcomes for people living with serious chronic diseases.”
AI services built for life sciences
As part of the partnership, Novo Nordisk will use services and applications from AWS, including Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, to develop AI-powered solutions across research and development, commercial operations, and enterprise IT.
Amazon Bio Discovery is a purpose-built application that gives scientists direct access to biological AI models for generating and evaluating potential drug candidates. The service connects computational design with physical lab testing through integrated lab partners, creating an iterative experimentation cycle that compresses the earliest and most time-consuming stages of drug development.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides the infrastructure for building AI agents that can reason across enterprise data, execute multi-step workflows, and integrate with existing systems. It enables organizations to move AI from isolated experiments to production-grade applications that operate reliably at scale.
Together, these services are designed to make AI accessible to scientists and business teams, not just AI experts, and to drive efficiencies across global pharmaceutical operations underpinned by AWS’s scalable and secure infrastructure.
Building on successful AI deployments
The expanded partnership builds on measurable results Novo Nordisk has already achieved with AWS. Using Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models, Novo Nordisk built a generative AI solution for employees to innovate and create applications for use cases across the value chain. More than 25,000 Novo Nordisk employees now use the solution to build chatbots that boost productivity, retrieve information, draft documents, and act as virtual colleagues for nonregulated processes.
These results demonstrate what becomes possible when AI tools are built into the daily workflows of a global pharmaceutical organization, and the new partnership is designed to extend this kind of impact across every stage of drug discovery and development.
“Novo Nordisk’s partnership with AWS shows what’s possible when you pair AI with deep life-sciences expertise — removing bottlenecks across drug discovery, not just studying them,” said Dan Sheeran, Vice President and General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS. “Together, we’re building agentic AI applications that accelerate research, clinical development, manufacturing, and IT operations to help Novo Nordisk move faster end-to-end.”
Read more about Novo Nordisk’s partnership with AWS in their announcement and learn more about AWS’s purpose-built services supporting healthcare and life sciences customers.