Biotech firm Moderna Inc. said today it has selected Amazon Web Services Inc. as its “preferred” cloud computing provider.

Under the partnership, Moderna said, it will use Amazon’s cloud platform as its standard for data analytics and machine learning workloads. Moderna is one of many pharmaceutical giants that are racing to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.

The pharmaceutical company said last week that its main candidate, mRNA-1273, had entered phase 3 of testing in the United States, which involves trials on 30,000 human subjects. The company was an AWS customer prior to today’s announcement, using its services for its accounting and inventory management, and to power its main production facility, robotics tools and engineering systems.

The process of developing a new vaccine involves thousands of hours of research and lab testing before it can be administered to humans safely. But Moderna has been able to use Amazon’s machine learning technology to speed up this process significantly.

The company said in a press release that it has built proprietary technology and methods that run on AWS to create “messenger RNA constructs” that human cells recognize as being naturally produced in the body. Moderna said that mRNA is key to its development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and that the technology it has built enables it to experiment rapidly with any mRNA sequence.

The company runs its Drug Design Studio on the AWS platform to design mRNA sequences for specific protein targets, and then uses Amazon’s analytics and machine learning technology to optimize those sequences for production, so they can be converted into physical mRNA that can be used in real-world tests. The company also uses the Amazon Redshift data warehouse service to aggregate the results of its experiments to aid in its vaccine designs.

“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,” Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. “AWS’ 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.”

Moderna has said the results of the human trials of its vaccine could be made public as early as October.

Photo: Moderna