December 2, 2021 – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced it is working with Pfizer to create innovative, cloud-based solutions with the potential to improve how new medicines are developed, manufactured, and distributed for testing in clinical trials.
According to a press release, the companies are exploring these advances through their newly created Pfizer Amazon Collaboration Team (PACT) initiative, which applies AWS capabilities in analytics, machine learning, compute, storage, security, and cloud data warehousing to Pfizer laboratory, clinical manufacturing and clinical supply chain efforts.
For instance, AWS is helping Pfizer enhance its continuous clinical manufacturing processes by incorporating predictive maintenance capabilities built with AWS machine learning services like Amazon Lookout for Equipment (AWS’s service for detecting abnormal equipment behavior by analyzing sensor data).
As a result, Pfizer can maximize uptime for equipment such as centrifuges, agitators, pulverizers, coaters, and air handlers used in clinical drug manufacturing. The overall focus of this collaboration is to support Pfizer in more rapidly and reliably producing new drugs and evaluating their potential health benefit for patients, the companies say.
AWS is working with Pfizer to develop a prototype solution for detecting abnormal data points in its drug product continuous clinical manufacturing platform for solid oral-dose medicines. The prototype solution is built using Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge), Amazon Lookout for Equipment, Amazon Lookout for Metrics (AWS’s service for automatically detecting anomalies in metrics and identifying their root cause), and Amazon QuickSight (AWS’s scalable machine learning-powered business intelligence service for the cloud).
The machine learning models used in the prototype were able to provide early warnings for alarms with minimal false positives, and direct users to the relevant signals. As a result, Pfizer can process data from the equipment and sensors involved in Portable Continuous Miniature and Modular (PCMM) manufacturing to detect anomalies as they occur, predict maintenance needs, and reduce potential equipment downtime.
Pfizer scientists will also collaborate with AWS healthcare and life sciences professionals to explore how researchers in Pfizer’s Pharmaceutical Sciences Small Molecules teams can extract and mine information from legacy documents by leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning services. To gain quick, secure access to the right information at the right time, Pfizer’s Pharmaceutical Sciences Small Molecules teams are working with AWS to develop a prototype system that can automatically extract, ingest, and process data from this documentation to help in the design of lab experiments.
The prototype system is powered by Amazon Comprehend Medical (AWS’s HIPAA-eligible natural language processing (NLP) service to extract information from unstructured medical text accurately and quickly) and Amazon SageMaker, and uses Amazon Cognito to deliver secure user access control.