Gilead Sciences Partners with AWS to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development

BEIJING, Nov. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AWS announced that Gilead Sciences, Inc. has selected AWS as its preferred cloud service provider. As a biopharmaceutical company researching innovative medicines for the prevention and treatment of life-threatening diseases, Gilead will drive innovation on AWS. With the support of AWS experts and partners in the healthcare and life sciences fields, Gilead will provide its data scientists with the latest technologies in machine learning and data analytics. These capabilities promote data-driven decision-making across the entire enterprise, from biomarker discovery to manufacturing and clinical trial recruitment, delivering insights to help Gilead optimize its drug development process. Gilead is also hosting all workloads for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) transformation project on AWS to deploy SAP S/4HANA.

Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Gilead SciencesMarc BersonSaid: "By choosing AWS as our preferred cloud service provider, our researchers can leverage various AWS services to quickly gain the insights, agility, and security needed for delivering new drugs. Treatments can be tailored to the unique needs of individuals rather than just targeting the disease itself. The performance, infrastructure, and scale of AWS are foundational to our ERP transformation, enabling us to become a more efficient, agile, secure, and data-driven enterprise in the cloud."

Gilead Sciences Leverages World-Leading Cloud Computing Architecture to Reinvent Bioinformatics Computing Infrastructure. Using AWS's computing, machine learning, and database services will support the analysis and integration of different genomic, imaging, and experimental datasets, enabling Gilead Sciences to make breakthroughs in disease diagnosis and treatment. For example, by securely analyzing large-scale anonymized patient genomic data on AWS to uncover genetic patterns, Gilead can observe cancer patients' responses to existing treatments, which could potentially accelerate the discovery of new therapies.

In addition, Gilead's IT department uses AWS to host all workloads for the ERP transformation project to deploy SAP S/4HANA. These systems support critical business processes in areas such as supply chain, finance, operations, and commercial sales for all therapeutic and business units. Running these processes on AWS lays the foundation for Gilead’s implementation of SAP S/4HANA. It also helps Gilead shorten hardware refresh cycles, improve agility in testing and deployment, and gain visibility to enhance business planning.

This is the first time Gilead Sciences has deployed an ERP system at a production scale in the cloud. AWS provided its IT transformation team with scalable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure. By collaborating with AWS, Gilead integrated its SAP environment with various advanced technologies offered by AWS, such as analytics and machine learning, to unlock business value and drive innovation. With AWS serving as the foundation for its new cloud-based SAP environment, Gilead will utilize various Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types in the future, including X1 and X1e instances designed for high-performance databases, in-memory databases, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications, to run ERP workloads more efficiently.

In the past year, Gilead Sciences has also migrated more than 50% of its data center infrastructure to AWS through the AWS Professional Services Accelerated Migration Program. The company also plans to migrate hundreds of applications to AWS, including key applications that support Good Practice (GxP) guidelines and regulations in areas such as drug manufacturing, storage, and distribution. As a result, Gilead Sciences is accelerating its plans to upgrade its IT operations using AWS, while avoiding upfront costs associated with hardware updates and ongoing costs of maintaining an "always-on" on-premises IT environment configured to meet peak demand. As another part of the migration, Gilead Sciences is establishing an automated disaster recovery environment on AWS, enabling its IT department to optimize and scale disaster recovery processes in the cloud, enhancing the resilience of its infrastructure.

With the help of AWS Professional Services and healthcare and life sciences experts, Gilead Sciences' R&D team is exploring innovative ways in the cloud. They are adopting an agile product development approach, using microservices to optimize and automate operational processes across the company, and building new data architectures to enable easier discovery of insights. Through this collaboration, Gilead aims to transform priority areas such as clinical program and study design, patient experience, and centralized statistical adaptive monitoring, which will help Gilead quickly identify and address potential issues related to clinical trial management.

Gilead Sciences is also AWS Smart Healthcare (Amazon for Health) One of the first users. AWS Smart Healthcare integrates AWS services and solutions from the AWS Partner Network (APN). Currently, thousands of healthcare and life sciences customers globally are using it. AWS Smart Healthcare provides mature and easy-to-use features that help companies accelerate innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized treatments and care methods in 16 key solution areas including healthcare, genomics, and biopharmaceuticals.

Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at AWSMatt GarmanSaid: "AWS provides world-leading cloud services with widely recognized performance, which can help Gilead Sciences innovate, expand, and deliver powerful therapies for treating diseases such as HIV and cancer, while advancing the standards of precision medicine. Gilead leverages AWS to enhance IT operational efficiency and utilizes AWS's smart healthcare solutions to continuously improve methods in clinical trials, drug development, manufacturing, and distribution. AWS offers the security, privacy protection, trusted expertise, and broad and deep services that healthcare and life sciences companies need to create transformative healthcare solutions that improve health and well-being."

Leading the Trend, Reshaping the Future!2021AWSre:InventGlobalConference Opens

The 2021 AWS re:Invent Global Conference, which has drawn significant attention from the industry,InOn November 29, 2021 (local time), the event grandly kicked off in the United States. The AWS re:Invent Global Conference, which began in 2012, is the leading industry event in the global cloud computing field. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the re:Invent Global Conference, and AWS will unveil a series of innovative technologies and services that will reshape the future. Additionally, customers from various industries worldwide, along with AWS partners, will be invited to share cutting-edge business innovation practices, continuing to lead the trends in cloud technology and industry development. This conference will be live-streamed online simultaneously. For more details, please follow the official WeChat account of AWS.