 Welcome to today's session of the CUBE's presentation of the AWS startup showcase, the next big thing in AI, security and life sciences. Today we'll be speaking with Aison as part of our life sciences track. And I'm pleased to welcome the co-founder as well as the chief science officer of Aison, Tony Monsano, we'll be discussing how artificial intelligence is driving key processes in pharma manufacturing. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you, Natalie, to you and to your presentation. Yeah, well, as you know, industry 4.0 is revolutionizing manufacturing across many industries. Let's talk about how it's impacting biotech and pharma and as well as Aison's contributions to this revolution. Well, actually pharma for the zero is totally introducing a new concept of how to manage processes. So nowadays the industry is considering that everything is practically static, nothing changes. And this is because they don't have the ability to manage the complexity and the variability around the biotech and the drug manufacturing processes. Nowadays with pharma for the zero technologies, cloud, our computing, IoT, AI, we can get all those data, we can understand the data and we can interact for real time with processes. This is how things are going on nowadays. Fascinating. Well, as you know, COVID-19 really threw a wrench in a lot of activity in the world, our economies and also people's way of life. How did it impact manufacturing in terms of scale up and scale out? And what are your observations from this year? You know, the main problem when you want to scale up process is not only the equipment, it's also the knowledge that you have around your process. When you're doing a vaccine in a small scale in your lab, all the parameters that you're controlling in your lab, they have to be escalated when you work from five liters to 2,500 liters. How to manage this difference of scale? Well, AI is helping nowadays in order to detect and to identify the most relevant factors involved in the process. The critical relationship between the variables and the final control of all the full process following a continued process verification. This is how we can help nowadays in using AI and cloud technologies in order to accelerate and to scale up vaccines like the COVID-19. And how do you anticipate pharma manufacturing to change in a post-COVID world? This is a very good question. Nowadays, we have some assumptions that we are trying to overpass just with human efforts. Nowadays, with the new situation, with the pandemic that we are living and the next evolution that we are doing, humans will take care about the good practices of the new knowledge that we have to generate. So AI will manage the repetitive tasks all the human cognition activities that we are doing. So that will be done by AI and humans will never will do again repetitive tasks in this way. They will manage complex problems and supervise AI output. So you're driving more efficiencies in the manufacturing process with AI. You recently presented at the United Nations industrial development organization about the challenges brought by COVID-19 and how AI is helping with the equitable distribution of vaccines and therapies. What are some of the ways that companies like AISON can now help with that kind of response? Very good point. Could you imagine you are a big company, a top pharma company that you have a patent and intellectual property of a COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA principle. And you are gonna, what you would like to expand this vaccination in order not to get the vaccination also to manufacture the vaccine. What about if you try to manufacture this vaccine in South Africa or in Asia, in India? So the secret is to transport not only the raw material not only the equipment also the knowledge how to proceed, how to control the full process from the initial phase till the packaging and the bios feeling. So this is how we are contributing. AI is packetizing all this knowledge in just AI models. This is the secret. Interesting. Well, what are the benefits for a pharma manufacturers when considering the implementation of AI and cloud technologies? And how can they progress in their digital transformation by utilizing them? One of the benefits is that you are able to manage the variability the real complexity in the world. So you cannot create processes in order to manufacture drugs just considering that the raw material that you are using is never changing. You cannot consider that all the agreements works in the same way. You cannot consider that your recipe will work in the same way in Brazil than in Singapore. So the complexity and the variability is must be understood as part of the process. This is one of the benefits. The second benefit is that if you use cloud technologies you have not to take care about computings, licenses, software updates, antivirus, scale up of computer computing everything is done in the cloud. So this is two main benefits there more but this is maybe the two main ones. Yeah, well, that's really interesting how you highlight how this really, there's a big shift how you handle this in different parts of the world. So what role does compliance and regulation play here? And of course we see differences in the way that's handled around the world as well. Well, I think that is the first time in the human race in the pharma, let me say, experience that we have a very strong commitment from the rotary bodies in order to push forward using this kind of technologies. Actually, for example, the FDA, the FDA using cloud to manage their own system. So why not to use them in pharma? Yeah, well, how does AWS and ASON help manufacturers address these kinds of considerations? Well, we have a very great partner. AWS for us is simplifying a lot of life. So we are a very, let me say different startup company, ASON, because we have a lot of PhDs in the company. So we are not the classical geeky company with guys all the day programming, developing. So we have a lot of science inside the company. So this is our value. So everything that this provided by Amazon, why we have to recreate again? So we can rely on SageMaker, we can rely on Cognito, we can rely on Lambda, we can rely on S3 to have encryption data with automatic backup. So AWS is simplifying a lot of life and we can dedicate all our knowledge and all our efforts to the things that we know, pharma compliance. And how do you anticipate that pharma manufacturing will change further in the 2021 year? Well, we are participating not only with business cases, we also participate with the community because we are leading international projects in order to anticipate this kind of new breakthroughs. So we are working with, let me say, initiatives in the PTA, the Parental Black Association. We are collaborating in two different projects in order to apply AI in computer specification in order to create models process for the mRNA vaccine. We are collaborating with the ASAB University creating the standards for AI application in GXP. We're collaborating with different initiatives with the pharma community in order to create the foundation to move forward during this year. And how do you see the competitive landscape? What do you think ASON provides compared to its competitors? Well, good question. Probably you can find a lot of AI services, platforms, programs, software that can run in the industrial environment. But I think that it will be very difficult to find a full GXP compliant platform working on cloud with AI and when AI is already qualified. I think that no one is doing that nowadays and one of the demonstrations for that is that we are also writing some scientific papers describing how to do that. So you will see that ASON is the only company that is doing that nowadays. Yeah. And how do you anticipate that pharma manufacturing will change or excuse me, how do you see that it is providing a defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? Well, there is no limits in cloud. So as far as you accept that everything is variant and complex, you will need power computing. So the only way to manage this complexity is running a lot of power computation. So cloud is the only system, let me say, that allows that. Well, the thing is that in pharma we have also to be compliance with the cloud providers. And for that, we created a new layer around the platform that we say qualification as a service. We are creating this layer in order to qualify continuously any kind of cloud platform that wants to work on pharma. This is how we are doing that. And in what areas are you looking to improve? How are you constantly trying to develop the product and bring it to the next level? Always we have in our mind the patient. So ASON is a patients and the company. Everything that we do is to improve processes in order to improve at the end to deliver the right medicine at the right time to the right patient. So this is how we are focusing all our efforts in order to bring this opportunity to everyone around the world. For the reason, for example, we want to work with this project where we are delivering value to create vaccines for COVID-19, for example, everywhere. Just packetizing the knowledge, using AI. This is how we envision and how we are acting. Yeah, well, you mentioned the importance of science and compliance. What do you think are the key themes that are the foundation of your company? The first thing is that we enjoy with the tasks that we are doing. This is the first thing. The other thing is that we are learning every day with our customers for real topics. So we are serving to the patients and everything that we do is enjoying science, enjoying how to achieve new breakthroughs in order to improve drug manufacturing. We know that at the end will be, well, deliver to the final patient. So enjoying making science and creating breakthroughs, be innovative. Right, and do you think that in the sense that we were lucky in light of COVID that we've already had these kind of technologies moving in this direction for some time that we were somehow able to mitigate the tragedy and the disaster of the situation because of these technologies? Sure, so we are lucky of these technologies because we are breaking the distance, the physical distance, and we are putting together people that was so difficult to do that in other different aspects. So nowadays we are able to be closer to the patients, the people, to the customers thanks to these technologies, yes. So now that also we're moving out of, I mean, hopefully out of this kind of COVID reality, what's next for ASON? Do you see more collaboration? What's next for the company? The next for the company is to deliver AI models that are able to be encapsulated in the drug manufacturing for vaccines, for example, and that will be delivered with the full process, not only materials, equipments, personal recipes. Also the AI models will go together as part of the recipe. Right, well, we'd love to hear more about your partnership with AWS. How did you get involved with them and why them and not another partner? Well, let me explain you a secret. Seven years ago, we started with another top cloud provider, but we saw very soon that these other cloud provider were not well aligned with the GXP requirements. For the reason we met with AWS, we went together to some seminars, conference with top pharma communities and pharma organizations. We went together to make speeches and talks and we felt that we fit very well together because AWS has a GXP white paper describing very well how to rely in AWS components one by one. So this is for us, this is a very good credential when we go to our customers. Do you know that when customers are acquiring and they are establishing the Azure platform in their systems, they are auditing us. They are auditing Azure. Well, we have to be also, we have to audit AWS because this is the normal chain in pharma supplier. Well, that means that we need this documentation. We need all this transparency between AWS and our partners. This is the main reason. Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation to hear how AI and cloud are revolutionizing pharma, manufacturing at such a critical time for society all over the world. Really appreciate your insights. Tony Monsano, the chief science officer and co-founder of ASON. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for the CUBE's presentation of the AWS startup showcase. Thanks very much for watching.