Pfizer Discusses Use of Supercomputing and AI for Covid Drug Development

Over 16 months ago, Pfizer achieved a historic scientific moonshot -- the unprecedentedly swift development and authorization of a novel vaccine for a novel virus using methods that hitherto had not been used in approved drugs at scale. Throughout the pandemic, nearly every public research supercomputer pivoted to some form of Covid research, but the pharmaceutical giants were characteristically cagey about their use of advanced technologies for vaccine and therapeutic development. At a session held during Nvidia's GTC22 this week, Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO of Deloitte, spoke to Lidia Fonseca, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer for Pfizer, about the company's use of HPC and AI in the development of its groundbreaking vaccines and therapeutics for Covid-19. Ucuzoglu opened the session -- a fireside chat titled "Pfizer's AI-enabled transformation" -- by lauding the "fastest development of a novel vaccine in history" and calling Pfizer a "poster child for the full promise of AI to society." He then continued by asking Fonseca how Pfizer is driving technology innovation in its value chain.