What industry could stand to pick up its pace more than pharmaceutical research? Look at the price of drugs in the U.S. It can take over 10 years and billions of dollars to develop one pill. Providing insight and historical context, modern machine-learning technologies could make pharma a more efficient industry.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. is adopting cloud technologies to speed up research into immuno-oncology therapies. These treatments boost the immune system in order to fight cancer.

“Our highest priority was our scientists’ productivity,” said Kathleen Natriello (pictured, right), vice president of corporate information technology at Bristol-Myers Squibb. BMS has teamed up with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Accenture LLP to develop solutions for its scientists and business units.

Genomics research requires huge volumes of data. With machine learning and artificial intelligence services from AWS, BMS scientists have drastically reduced the time it takes to process them.

Natriello and Shalu Chadha (pictured, left), technology lead, products North East North America, at Accenture, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. They discussed how the three-way partnership is injecting speed and agility into typically glacier-paced pharma processes. (* Disclosure below.)

It’s about time for agility in pharma

BMS has implemented several AWS cloud services that enable scientists to use AI for computational approaches and simulations. They slash the time and cost required to complete an experiment, according to Natriello.

“They no longer have to use actual physical material or patients or investigators. They can do it all through simulation and modelling,” she said.

It uses AI-powered robotics process automation across legal and compliance, and is now starting to use them in clinical trials. It is trying to become “quicker with how the patients are going to see both responses to adverse events, as well as how do you accelerate the clinical trial process,” Chadha said.

Scientists are the biggest advocates for the introduction of new tech, according to Natriello. “They are doing things with machine learning and artificial intelligence with these simulations … in a few hours that used to take them weeks and months,” she stated.

Business functions are enthusiastically on-board as well. “Very often, the business functions are the ones that introduce the new technologies, because they’re really interested in it,” Natriello concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE