How Are Tech Companies Transforming the Future of Healthcare During COVID-19?

Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and other tech giants are investing heavily in health and wellness, even with no prior experience in drug discovery, due to the synergies in the applications of technology in health and pharmacare. This week, Moderna announced a strategic partnership with AWS to tap its analytics and machine learning workloads to create a new generation of medicines and expedite the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Let’s find out what is attracting tech leaders to the healthcare and pharma industry.

Technology leaders are continuously looking for ways to establish their foothold in the rapidly evolving healthcare sector. Recently, the biotechnology market has become one of the coveted markets for tech titans, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. So, what’s driving this interest? 

With the integration of healthcare and technology, there have been groundbreaking inventions including surgical robots, 3D printing of medical instruments, AI to develop drugs, virtual reality to train future surgeons, and bots to improve patient experience and telemedicine. These innovations in the trillion-dollar industry are a testimony that the healthcare market is the perfect ground for innovation and investments. Tech leaders have previously collaborated with pharma titans like Merck and Pfizer, who lack experience managing tons of digital information. And of course, there’s no disputing the huge opportunity to digitally disrupt this space. 

The biotechnology sector has especially seen  boardroom interest lately, courtesy COVID-19. While Microsoft collaboratedOpens a new window with drugmaker Novartis to solve life science challenges with AI, Apple investedOpens a new window $10 million in COPAN Diagnostics to accelerate the supply of sample collection kits for testing COVID-19. More recently, a jointly developed COVID-19 tracing app by Apple and Google was successfully launched in Virginia, making it the first state in the US to offer the COVID-19 tracing app.

A recent research reportOpens a new window by Technavio revealed that the biotechnology reagents market is projected to reach $118 billion by 2024. And North America holds the highest market share with dominant players, including Bio-Rad Laboratories, General Electric, Abbott Laboratories, and Moderna Therapeutics. 

This week, Moderna announced that it has partnered with Amazon’s cloud services to speed up R&D to build messenger-Ribonucleic acid (mRNA) medicines for COVID-19 and other life-threatening diseases. The biotech giant will leverage the AWS platform to perform data analytics and machine learning. Before this, Moderna and AWS have worked together for its manufacturing, accounting, and inventory management, to power Moderna’s automated production facility with AWS IoT services, and develop personalized cancer vaccines.

How Is AWS Platform Assisting Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine Ambitions?

Thanks to the AWS cloud platform, Moderna was able to shift from the initial coronavirus sequence to phase 1 clinical batch of COVID-19 vaccine candidate (mRNA-1273) in merely 42 days. Moderna runs its Drug Design Studio on AWS infrastructure, which enables it to design mRNA drugs quickly. Then, the drugs are analyzed using machine learning to optimize the sequences for manufacturing. Moderna’s manufacturing platform also runs on AWS, converting the sequences into physical mRNA for testing, and leverages the AWS platform to transfer its digital manufacturing model onto its partner’s facilities and speed up its production capacity.

Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s Chief Executive Officer, saysOpens a new window , “With AWS, our researchers can quickly design and execute research experiments and rapidly uncover new insights to get potentially life-saving treatments into production faster. AWS’s breadth and depth of services support our mission to create a new generation of medicines for patients. They are instrumental in our quest to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 and other life-threatening diseases.”

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