Biopharma Firm Gilead Picks Amazon as Cloud Provider

Biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences has chosen Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider, AWS announced Monday (Nov. 29).

“Innovating on AWS and with the help of AWS experts and partners in healthcare and life sciences, Gilead provides its data scientists with the latest advances in machine learning and analytics,” the company said in a news release.

“These capabilities fuel data-driven decision making across the organization—from biomarker discovery through manufacturing and clinical trial recruitment—and deliver insights that can help Gilead refine its drug pipeline.”

AWS’s compute, machine learning, and database capabilities will help California-based Gilead make breakthroughs in the treatment and diagnoses of illnesses, according to the release.

For example, AWS will let the company securely analyze deidentified patient genomic data at scale to reveal patterns, and in doing so glean insights on how cancer patients react to therapeutic options, hopefully speeding the discovery of new treatments.

Read more: Gilead COVID-19 Drug Being Trialed, But Consumers Want A Vaccine

“With AWS as our preferred cloud provider, our researchers can use AWS’s portfolio of services to gain the insights, agility, and security needed to deliver new medicines at speed, and treat the individual according to their unique needs, not just the disease,” Gilead Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Marc Berson said in the announcement.

“AWS’s performance, infrastructure, and scale are the foundations on which we will complete our ERP transformation and become a more efficient, agile, secure, and data-driven business in the cloud.”

Over the past year, Gilead has moved more than half its data center footprint to AWS, with plans to shift hundreds of applications to AWS, including those that “support industry good practices (GxP) guidelines and regulations” in areas that include drug manufacturing and storage.

“By streamlining their IT operations with AWS and taking advantage of our AWS for Health offerings, Gilead has the ability to continuously refine its approach to clinical trials, drug development, manufacturing, and distribution,” said Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Garman.

Also read: AWS Widens Availability Of Amazon HealthLake

Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services announced it was widening the availability of its Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible tool that lets healthcare and life sciences organizations take in, keep, search and gain insights from massive volumes of health data.