While it’s been prominent in the news for the past year for its COVID vaccine, biotech giant Moderna has been busy working on other healthcare fronts, as well, recently with the announcement of a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Academy.
The company says the AI Academy will be focused on educating employees in integrating AI and machine learning solutions into every Moderna system process to bring mRNA medicines to patients.
"Moderna is advancing mRNA medicines at a breadth, speed and scale that is uncommon in the biopharmaceutical industry, and we attribute this speed in part to the incorporation of digital technologies in our company," said Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, in a press release. "As we look at the next 10-20 years, we believe that we have to learn as fast as we can to maximize the impact of mRNA technologies to patients and scale our company in a very different way than large companies have scaled in the last decades. We believe AI is a key enabler of our ability to build the best version of Moderna now and into the future.”
CMU's Department of Statistics & Data Science and the Tepper School of Business are collaborating with professors across the university to design and deliver Moderna's AI Academy. The program will develop a tailored curriculum for working professionals that will focus on topics including data quality and data visualization, statistical thinking and models, machine learning algorithms and AI ethics.
According to the company, the breadth and depth of content will endeavor to help all employees think strategically about how to leverage AI in their specific job functions. To that end, the AI Academy will connect Moderna staff directly with CMU's faculty both in person and online using the Integrated Statistics Learning Environment (ISLE), an interactive educational platform developed at the university.
"We are excited to deliver a world-class AI curriculum to Moderna and support the company's deep-rooted commitment to discovery and innovation that protects public health," said CMU President Farnam Jahanian. "With decades-long leadership in the field, Carnegie Mellon is uniquely positioned to help businesses learn how to use AI to drive the kinds of breakthroughs needed to address urgent societal challenges."
Moderna will launch the program next week with its first cohort of students and is targeting early 2022 for the full rollout.
Photo by LeoWolfert/Getty Images