“People literally talk about how AI is going to cure diseases someday, and I think this is a very meaningful first step,” said CEO Sam Altman about OpenAI’s partnership with Moderna. The hottest AI startup has recently partnered with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company to develop mRNA medicines.

As part of the deal, approximately 3,000 Moderna employees will gain access to ChatGPT Enterprise, developed on OpenAI’s GPT-4. Moderna plans to use ChatGPT Enterprise for mRNA medicine development to launch up to 15 new products in the next five years, including a vaccine for RSV and personalised cancer treatments.

Interestingly, Moderna was one of the first customers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise when it was launched last year. Prior to that, Moderna launched mChat in 2023, their own instance of ChatGPT built on top of OpenAI’s API.

Till date, the employees at Moderna have created over 750 GPTs, designed to support specific tasks or processes across the business. Some of these GPTs assist in selecting optimal doses for clinical trials and drafting responses to regulatory questions.

Moderna x ChatGPT Enterprise 

One of the solutions that Moderna has built and is actively developing and validating with ChatGPT Enterprise is a pilot program called Dose ID. It has the ability to review and analyse clinical data, integrating and visualising large datasets. Dose ID is designed to assist the clinical study team in data analysis, enhancing their clinical judgment and decision-making.

Apart from Dose ID, there is another GPT called Contract Companion GPT, which helps the legal team at Moderna get a clear, readable summary of a contract. The Policy Bot GPT helps employees get quick answers about internal policies without needing to search through hundreds of documents. 

Moderna’s corporate brand team has also found many ways to take advantage of ChatGPT Enterprise. They have a GPT that helps prepare slides for quarterly earnings calls, and another that helps convert biotech terminology into approachable language for investor communications. 

Moderna is not Alone 

Last year, during AWS re:Invent, Pfizer announced that they are using generative AI for drug discovery. Pfizer developed a new generative AI platform Charlie, named after the pharmaceutical giant’s founder.

“We are leveraging generative AI, which is estimated to deliver annual cost savings of $750 million to $1 billion in the near term—a real tangible value,” said Lidia Fonseca, chief digital and technology officer at Pfizer. 

She added that using AWS cloud services, Pfizer rapidly deployed Vox, an internal generative AI platform, enabling colleagues to access LLMs available in Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker.

“A variety of LLMs in Bedrock means we can select the best tools for use cases in R&D, manufacturing, marketing, and more, enabling Pfizer and AWS to prototype 17 different use cases in a matter of weeks.”

“AI and generative AI will help us identify new oncology targets, a process that is largely manual today. With AI, we can search and collate relevant data and scientific content from many more sources in a fraction of the time,” she added.

Meanwhile, Novartis has partnered with Isomorphic Labs. “We announced a partnership with Isomorphic Labs, which is a spin-out of DeepMind from Google, to also see how we can speed up our ability to drug new potential targets for new medicines,” said Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan.

“AI is going to impact many of our productivity efforts in drug development, like how fast can we generate new trial protocols, how fast can we work with regulators, how fast can we look at patient safety, and look at large patient data sets,” he added.

Similarly, AstraZeneca partnered with the US AI biologics firm Absci to design an antibody to fight cancer. 

Last year, Google introduced Med-PaLM 2, an LLM fine-tuned for healthcare. Recently, the tech giant introduced MedLM for chest X-ray, which simplifies radiology workflows by assisting with the classification of chest X-rays for a variety of use cases.

With pharmaceutical companies partnering with generative AI startups and firms, the future of medicines and drug discovery is set to become more efficient and cost-effective.