Moderna taps into AWS to boost Covid-19 vaccine research

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IANS | 06 Aug, 2020
The biotechnology major Moderna which has entered the phase III clinical trials for its Covid-19 vaccine has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred Cloud partner as well as its standard for analytics and Machine Learning (ML) workloads.

Moderna is pioneering a new class of messenger RNA (mRNA) medicines.

Leveraging its mRNA platform and manufacturing facility with the AWS-powered research engine, Moderna delivered the first clinical batch of its vaccine candidate (mRNA-1273) against COVID-19 to the NIH for the Phase I trial, 42 days after the initial sequencing of the virus.

"The science behind mRNA medicines is advancing at a rapid pace, and building Moderna's technology platform on AWS gives our scientists the insights, agility, and security they need to continue to lead in the industry," said Stephane Bancel, Moderna's Chief Executive Officer.

"With AWS, our researchers have the ability to quickly design and execute research experiments and rapidly uncover new insights to get potentially life-saving treatments into production faster," Bancel said in a statement late on Wednesday.

Moderna has invented proprietary technologies and methods that run on AWS to create mRNA constructs that cells recognize as if they were produced in the body.

This invention has empowered Moderna to experiment rapidly on virtually any mRNA sequence, easily shifting between research priorities, without investing in new technology.

In addition, by leveraging Amazon Redshift – AWS's fully managed data warehousing service – Moderna's scientists and engineers aggregate results from dozens of experiments that are running in parallel and can easily query and share insights to refine their design and production cycle quickly.

"Running on AWS, Moderna has the agility to continuously refine its research, development, and manufacturing," said Matt Garman, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at AWS.

"Moderna is relying on the proven performance and scale of the world's leading cloud to innovate and develop drug and vaccine candidates on timelines that may have been impossible even just a few years ago."