Moderna announced a partnership with OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) company behind ChatGPT, on Wednesday morning.
Moderna noted that the groundbreaking collaboration is built on a shared vision of AI’s potential to transform business and healthcare. The biopharma said the partnership will integrate generative AI into its medical operations and drive innovation.
“Just as the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s changed the way we work and live, AI is on a path to completely transform our everyday lives — and OpenAI is helping to lead the way,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.
He hinted that Moderna has an ambitious plan to launch multiple products over the next few years, indicating that working with OpenAI and other likeminded companies is critical to its ability to scale and maximize the impact on patients.
Recently, Bancel has pushed the idea that Moderna plans to use AI to reinvent all of its business processes across science, legal and manufacturing, telling The Wall Street Journal it plans to use AI “everywhere.”
In a video launched along with the announcement, several leaders at Moderna detail how the company has already begun to do that.
Bancel notes the company plans to roll out 15 new products in the next five years — but acknowledges that doing it the “old biopharmaceutical way,” would require 100,000 employees to accomplish.
He adds that Moderna can launch those 15 products with its current 6,000 staffers using AI.
The partnership between the pharma giant and OpenAI can be traced back to early last year, when Moderna launched a version of ChatGPT — dubbed mChat — using OpenAI’s internal API.
Moderna noted that mChat has seen 80% internal adoption since it was launched, ultimately accelerating an AI culture that spurred the pharma to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise — which provides enterprise-grade security and privacy for organizations. With that came the adoption of advanced analytics, image generation and a host of other GPTs, Moderna said, which are now used as assistants for its employees.
Since it adopted ChatGPT enterprise, Moderna has deployed some 750 GPTs across the company. That includes Dose ID GPT, which can help clinical research teams evaluate vaccine doses. The clinical review is led by humans and augmented with AI input.
Moderna has been investing heavily in its non-COVID mRNA vaccine pipeline to make up for the drop in COVID-19 sales, banking on several vaccines in development for the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), norovirus, herpes simplex virus and others.
It’s also been eyeing AI partnerships for the last year, striking a deal with IBM last year to invest in GenAI to help it explore quantum approaches to drug development.
