Seattle: Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday launched Amazon Bio Discovery, an artificial intelligence application designed to speed early-stage drug discovery by allowing scientists to run complex computational workflows without writing code.

Drugmakers and technology companies have stepped up efforts to use AI to accelerate drug development.

Amazon Web Services said in a blog post that Amazon Bio Discovery gives researchers access to a library of specialized biological foundation models that can generate and evaluate potential drug molecules, along with an AI agent that helps users select models, set parameters and interpret results.

Researchers can send shortlisted candidates to integrated lab partners for synthesis and testing, with results routed back into the system to guide the next round of design.

“(It) would take, 18 months to come up with 300,000 potential drug candidates. Now, scientists can quickly create 300,000 candidates within a couple of weeks,” Rajiv Chopra, vice president of healthcare AI and life sciences at AWS, said.

Chopra said the rapid rise of drug-discovery models has turned computational biologists who can translate lab goals into machine-learning pipelines into a bottleneck.

AWS said Bayer, the Broad Institute and Voyager Therapeutics are among early adopters, and 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies already use its cloud services.

Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2026