For Amgen, artificial intelligence (AI) is not just a technological advancement, it is a pivotal force shaping the future of biotechnology. “We are at an inflection point where technology and biotechnology are coming together to revolutionize how medicines are discovered, developed, manufactured and commercialized,” said David Rees, Amgen's first Chief Technology Officer and former head of research and development. “Amgen is committed to leveraging AI to accelerate the delivery of new therapies while also increasing productivity and equipping our workforce with future-ready skills.”
It's this vision of how AI can help advance medical science and help patients that makes Rees so confident in applying the technology across the company as Amgen's first Chief Technology Officer. And under Rees's guidance, Amgen is embracing a major shift to integrate AI at all levels of its operations to unlock its potential to increase productivity, drive innovation and accelerate the development of new therapies. In addition to broadly adopting AI tools, Amgen has also outlined an artificial intelligence vision that commits to both building trustworthy AI tools and using them responsibly.
“For scientists with new ideas, new technologies are reducing the time it takes to find, analyze and compile data from days and weeks to minutes,” Rees said, highlighting one example of how Amgen leaders view these tools as powerful drivers of innovation. Now available from multiple partners, the tools are getting more powerful every day. In both office and lab environments, Amgen employees can streamline repetitive, time-consuming routine tasks, freeing up time to accelerate innovation efforts that improve the company's ability to serve patients.
Management AI tools free up staff time to tackle more advanced tasks
The application of AI at Amgen is present in all aspects of the company, with its most widespread application coming in the form of productivity tools that employees can use in their daily work. These AI tools have the potential to enhance and enhance human skills and creativity. The primary goal of AI productivity is to reduce or eliminate repetitive manual tasks, allowing staff to spend more time on higher level challenges that help drive innovation.
Amgen was an early adopter of Microsoft Copilot, a generative AI productivity tool, initially trialing it with a small number of employees, but now has access to 20,000 employees, allowing them to test and learn the tool that is quickly becoming popular.
“The introduction of Copilot and Generative AI is important for Amgen and our industry,” said Mike Zahigian, Amgen's chief information officer. “Every second counts in our mission to serve patients. Every second we can get back is precious.”
Amgen's use of Copilot was showcased at the 2024 Microsoft BUILD conference in Seattle, Washington.
In the lab, AI opens up new opportunities for drug discovery
Another area where AI is poised to make a big difference at Amgen is in the lab, where scientists are working to better understand and treat some of the world's most challenging diseases. To accelerate research and development across the globe, Amgen is using cutting-edge technology from companies like NVIDIA to build AI models that enable scientists to rapidly tackle complex operations like “generative biology.”
Generative biology is a relatively new field that uses AI tools to generate models of protein-based molecules designed to interact with specific disease targets, and then runs simulations to predict which designs will be safest and most effective for humans. Scientists can now run millions of simulations at a time, rapidly accelerating and improving the accuracy of identifying the most promising molecules to be developed as potential medicines for real-world testing.
Earlier this year, Amgen also announced the deployment of the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputer. FreyaThe de-identified human data is stored in the deCODE Genetics laboratories in Reykjavik, Iceland, an Amgen subsidiary. The facility is home to one of the world's largest libraries of de-identified human data, spanning approximately 300 petabytes (1 petabyte is 1 million gigabytes). Before the development of AI and machine learning, analyzing this amount of data was nearly impossible, but now these tools are enabling Amgen to discover and unlock new insights into human health and diversity, with the potential to dramatically change the treatment landscape for some of the world's most challenging diseases.
David Rees, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Amgen
“We want to effectively mine that data for deep biological insights that can create new drug development programs for serious diseases,” Rees said at a recent summit at Amgen headquarters in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where leaders from Amgen and NVIDIA discussed the new technology's potential to advance medicine.
Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare, NVIDIA
“We now have what you might call an AI factory. We've built it,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA, speaking to Amgen employees at the summit. “The software is there, the compute is there, the data generation that you're doing with the sophisticated science, and the sophisticated science and breakthroughs that you've been doing for decades now, the AI factory is now here and we can imagine a full industrial revolution.”
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