News

AWS Customer Win: Moderna, COVID-19 Vaccine Front-Runner

• By David Ramel
• 08/07/2020

Cloud providers often trumpet big customer wins, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) didn't miss the opportunity to publicize a particularly timely one with the potential to be the biggest of all: Moderna, a biotech front-runner to produce the first vaccine for COVID-19.

AWS this week announced the firm picked AWS as its preferred cloud provider and its standard for analytics and machine learning workloads.

"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 1 trial 42 days after the initial sequencing of the virus," the release said soon after.

While many efforts are underway to provide the first vaccine for the deadly coronavirus, a search for "COVID-19 vaccine" shows Moderna in most if not nearly all of the top results. Also, the firm is one of eight companies funded by Operation Warp Speed, the public/private partnership initiated by the federal government to hasten a vaccine.

"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," AWS said. "This invention has empowered Moderna to experiment rapidly on virtually any mRNA sequence, easily shifting between research priorities, without investing in new technology. Moderna runs its Drug Design Studio on AWS's highly scalable compute and storage infrastructure to quickly design mRNA sequences for protein targets."

AWS services and technologies said to be leveraged by the biotech firm include analytics and machine learning, the Redshift fully managed data warehousing service, AWS IoT services and more.

"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," AWS quoted Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel as saying. "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. AWS's breadth and depth of services are supporting our mission to create a new generation of medicines for patients and are instrumental in our quest to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 and other life-threatening diseases."