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Build Gen AI Applications in Life Sciences with Amazon Nova

May 16, 2025 by Nandan Umarji

The life sciences industry is poised for a data revolution. With petabytes of genomic sequences, clinical trial data, molecular structures, and medical literature available at researchers' fingertips, the real challenge lies in deriving insights from it efficiently and responsibly.

GenAI is a transformative force that can accelerate drug discovery, personalize patient care, and automate clinical documentation. However, deploying GenAI in life sciences isn’t straightforward. The data is highly sensitive, the models must adhere to strict compliance standards, and the infrastructure needs to be robust, secure, and scalable.

That's where AWS built Amazon Nova, a purpose-built platform for Gen AI application development. It empowers life science organizations to securely create, scale, and manage Gen AI applications using AWS's most advanced foundation models, compute, and security features.

 

What Is Amazon Nova?

Amazon Nova is a fully managed platform for building enterprise-grade generative AI applications. It offers:

  • Access to curated foundation models (FMs) through Amazon Bedrock
  • Integrated tools for prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning
  • Multi-modal support (text, image, code, etc.)
  • Built-in data security and compliance
  • Seamless integration with AWS services like Amazon S3, SageMaker, Redshift, and HealthLake

With Amazon Nova, developers and researchers can prototype Gen AI applications in days while maintaining HIPAA compliance, auditability, and complete data sovereignty.

 

Use Cases of Gen AI in Life Sciences

Here's how Gen AI applications, built on Nova, are already transforming the life sciences domain:

1. Accelerated Drug Discovery

  • Molecular Structure Generation: Use Gen AI to predict 3D protein folding or generate novel compound structures.
  • Literature Mining: Automate the extraction of insights from millions of research papers and clinical trial records.
  • Target Identification: Use embeddings and RAG to identify potential biological targets from large datasets.

 

2. Clinical Trial Optimization

  • Patient Eligibility Screening: Automate identification of eligible participants from EHR data.
  • Protocol Optimization: Use Gen AI to simulate and refine trial protocols, reducing time-to-market.

 

3. Precision Medicine

  • Genomic Interpretation: Fine-tune models on patient-specific genomic data to suggest treatments.
  • Personalized Recommendations: Leverage patient history and real-time data for individualized therapy suggestions.

 

4. Regulatory Compliance Automation

  • Document Summarization: Summarize and classify regulatory documents using LLMs.
  • Adverse Event Detection: Scan reports and social data for signs of drug side effects.

 

How do you build Gen AI applications with Amazon Nova?

Let's break down the process of building a Gen AI application for genomic data interpretation using Amazon Nova:

Step 1: Select Your Foundation Model via Bedrock

Amazon Nova supports FMs from Anthropic, Cohere, Meta (Llama 3), and AWS Titan. For life sciences, you might choose:

  • Claude for reasoning-heavy tasks (e.g., interpreting literature)
  • Titan Embeddings for similarity search and RAG
  • Meta Llama 3 for general-purpose NLP tasks

Nova makes switching models seamless without code changes.

 

Step 2: Prepare and Connect Your Life Sciences Data

Use Amazon HealthLake or Amazon S3 to ingest and structure your data, including:

  • Clinical notes
  • Genomic sequences
  • Trial reports

Nova ensures encrypted, access-controlled storage and integrates with Lake Formation for fine-grained permissions.

 

Step 3: Build Your Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Pipeline

RAG ensures the model reasons over your internal documents rather than hallucinating. Nova provides tools to:

  • Embed documents using Titan or Cohere
  • Index them in Amazon OpenSearch Serverless
  • Retrieve relevant context in real time during model inference

 

Step 4: Fine-Tune the Model with Amazon SageMaker

Base FMs need domain-specific fine-tuning (e.g., biotech terminology or structured EHRs). In that case, Nova allows you to do this directly with SageMaker JumpStart or LoRA fine-tuning, without writing low-level training scripts.

 

Step 5: Secure and Monitor the Application

Nova bakes in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), CloudTrail, and GuardDuty for logging, authentication, and threat detection.

For healthcare applications, enable HIPAA-eligible services, set up private link endpoints, and leverage AWS Audit Manager for compliance tracking.

 

Step 6: Deploy Using Nova's No-Code and Low-Code Tools

Build secure, scalable applications with:

  • Nova Studio (drag-and-drop interface for workflows)
  • Nova API Gateway (deploy models as RESTful endpoints)
  • Nova Workspaces (collaborate across data science and bioinformatics teams)

 

Advantages of Using Amazon Nova in Life Sciences

 

Feature

Benefits in Life Sciences

Native integration with Bedrock

Access to diverse foundation models

Enterprise-grade security

HIPAA compliance, end-to-end encryption

Scalable infrastructure

Handle terabytes of genomic or trial data

No-code/low-code development

Democratizes Gen AI for researchers

Cost-efficient compute options

Pay-as-you-go supports GPU and CPU configurations

Audit & governance

Automated compliance, lineage tracking, and role-based access

Conclusion

Generative AI has the potential to redefine innovation in life sciences. However, it requires the right platform to manage complexity, scale securely, and comply with regulations.

Amazon Nova provides that platform.

Whether you're a biotech startup, research hospital, or pharmaceutical giant, Nova offers everything you need to design, build, and deploy Gen AI applications that truly make a difference, without compromising safety or compliance.

Mactores is helping innovators like you build powerful GenAI applications to transform research and discovery. Ready to get started? Your first consultation is entirely free.

 

Let's Talk
 

 

FAQs

  • Does Amazon have a generative AI tool?
    Yes, Amazon offers generative AI capabilities through Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Nova, enabling users to build, customize, and deploy GenAI applications using leading foundation models.
  • Is Nova a good image generator?
    Amazon Nova primarily focuses on text-based and multimodal GenAI applications; while it supports some visual capabilities, it’s not specialized in high-resolution image generation like tools such as MidJourney or DALL·E.
  • What is the Amazon Nova model?
    Amazon Nova is not a single model but a platform that provides access to multiple foundation models (e.g., Claude, Llama 3, Titan) for building and managing GenAI applications on AWS.
  • What is the role of GenAI in drug discovery?
    GenAI accelerates drug discovery by generating novel molecules, predicting protein structures, mining biomedical literature, and simulating clinical trial scenarios faster than traditional methods.
  • What are the trends in GenAI life sciences?
    Key trends include AI-driven personalized medicine, automated clinical documentation, digital biomarker discovery, and integration of multimodal data for faster insights and decisions.
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