Transforming drug discovery: Novo Nordisk uses the power of AI and Azure with Microsoft Research

With over 100 years of insulin research data, Novo Nordisk sought to scale drug discovery into adjacent areas like obesity, heart disease, and liver disease using AI and machine learning for precision medicine. In partnership with Microsoft Research, it built an AI platform on Azure combining Azure AI and data infrastructure, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Power BI/Power Apps for collaboration, forming a unified system for data discovery, copilot-assisted reasoning, governance, and model sharing. The teams published initial results with predictive AI models for advanced cardiovascular disease risk detection, and per Lars Fogh Iversen (SVP of Digital Science & Innovation), developed "an algorithm that can predict patients' cardiovascular risk better than the best clinical standards." No specific accuracy percentages or timeline metrics are given.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud AI platform, combining Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service — the delivery channel for a large share of pharma's enterprise GPT deployments.

This sits in the Build stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the foundation-model labs and platforms pharma teams use to actually construct, train and generate the model or application.