Amazon Web Services global chief medical officer and director, Rowland Illing, says that AWS is already working with pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca, to overhaul how they make drugs — from research and discovery to manufacturing — using AI agents.

Illing sat down with Ruth to talk about what agentic AI is and how it’s being used to change how drugs are made.

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

What is agentic AI?

An AI agent is a software program that can interact with this environment, collect data and then use that information to perform self-determined tasks to meet a predetermined goal. But it’s not linear, so you don’t program in all the steps it has to follow.

It’s got a certain degree of autonomy and flexibility in the way that it fulfills its predetermined goal. So humans set the goals, but then the AI agent independently chooses the best action it needs to perform the goals based upon its surrounding environment.

Agents can interact with other agents. You can actually have specialized agents interacting around certain tasks they’re good at, and then you have an orchestrating agent at the end that has the overarching meta goal in mind, about what it’s got to get to.

How are you using AI agents in health care?

We’re working with organizations like AstraZeneca for drug discovery so you can accelerate research and discovery.

You can think about intelligent, clinical-trial design very differently. So you can actually look at all the clinical trials, how they’re run, what outcomes you actually want to achieve, and then work backwards from those outcomes to actually optimally design the trial. And that requires an integration of vast amounts of information and evidence to inform the best way to design trials.

You can actually get agents doing that manual process: organizing research workflows that will allow the scientists then to focus on the research itself. And you can have laboratory chambers of experimentation agents that streamline processes and protocols and then produce the outcomes once you’ve done the initial experimentation in front of your clinical trials. You can have statistical planning agents that can make sure that when you get to the regulatory submission, it is actually a valid study. Next thing is kind of the manufacturing piece.

So kind of go from the research and the development, and you got the manufacturing circle, all of this document generation required for creating regulatory blueprints that’s going to be submitted to the [Food and Drug Administration].

What is the oversight mechanism for the work that the agents are doing?

You still need to have humans in the loop, because they need to set the parameters. They need to say what they want this whole multigenic pathway to do — what is the outcome they are actually trying to achieve. So there needs to be protocols and policies built in.

There need to be guardrails. You have to be very targeted about what agents are looking at and the data they’re deriving from it and the guardrails about the kind of outputs they’re providing.

from AXIOS:

Rate shopping intensifies ACA drama

By Peter Sullivan

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Premium increases are starting to hit home for millions of Americans as state-run Affordable Care Act marketplaces begin posting rates for next year that are based on the assumption Congress won’t renew expiring financial assistance. Why it matters: Sticker shock could lead many Americans to conclude health coverage is out of reach while the government remains in a shutdown that centers on the fate of enhanced ACA subsidies that will sunset at year’s end. Driving the news: “Window shopping,” when ACA enrollees can preview their premiums for next year, is already underway in a half dozen states and begins today in California, Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont. In Idaho, the actual enrollment for 2026 coverage also begins today. Signs-ups begin November 1 for the rest of the country. Democrats are already seizing on early examples of premium increases to prod Republicans to extend the subsidies. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) posted on X a potential premium increase, sent to him by a constituent, from $307 per month to $964 per month. The post has 6.5 million views. On average, premiums for roughly 22 million ACA enrollees will more than double without a subsidy extension, per KFF. What they’re saying: Brad Woodhouse, president of the Democratic-aligned group Protect Our Care, said the group has created a toolkit to allow lawmakers to post examples similar to Warnock’s and drive home the point that the pain has arrived. “I think after tomorrow when this window shopping starts to open, and you start to see this data trickle out, I think it’s going to put Republicans in a tremendous bind,” Woodhouse said yesterday. The other side: Republicans say they are open to talks about extending the enhanced ACA subsidies in a modified form, but not as a precondition for reopening the government, as Democrats insist it should be. Keep reading from STAT: Pelage raises $120 million for treatment to regrow hair Los Angeles-based Pelage Pharmaceuticals said this morning that it has raised $120 million in a Series B round co-led by ARCH Venture Partners and GV — Google Ventures — to advance PP405, a topical small molecule that reactivates dormant hair follicle stem cells to spur regrowth. Backed by Phase 2a safety data from this summer and early signs of efficacy in androgenetic alopecia, the company plans to launch Phase 3 trials in 2026 in both men and women. The midstage results showed that PP405 was well tolerated, the company said, with no systemic absorption detected in the blood, and no systemic adverse events. The drug works on a metabolic switch in follice stem cells, stemming from work conducted by scientists at UCLA.