Japanese firm Takeda Pharmaceutical has entered into a five-year strategic agreement with Accenture and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to accelerate Takeda’s digital transformation.

The partnership will help Takeda to respond to patient needs with greater speed, agility, and insights across the value chain, and benefits customers, employees, and partners. This long-term collaboration will fuel Takeda’s cloud-driven business transformation by modernizing platforms, accelerating data services, establishing an internal engine for innovation, and equipping Takeda’s employees with new skills and ways of working.

“By combining the power of three organizations, Takeda is making a bold move to be at the intersection of human health, technology and business growth,” said Christophe Weber, Takeda president and chief executive officer. 

Takeda aims to empower employees with an artificial intelligence assistant to help make better decisions, enabling better transformative therapies and better experiences to patients, physicians and payers faster than previously possible.

Taking a cloud-first technology approach will create a more scalable, reliable and secure architecture and eliminate unnecessary integration activities. By moving 80% of applications to the cloud, Takeda will remove non-differentiating technology, reduce its internal data center footprint, and decrease capital expenditures. By leveraging the most comprehensive set of cloud services in the industry, innovators like Takeda can cut costs, with better insight towards discoveries.

The collaboration has helped Takeda harness the cloud to launch, in less than five days, a secure data sharing and clinical trial acceleration platform for the COVID R&D Alliance.

In addition, the Plasma-Derived Therapies Business Unit, which develops critical, life-saving and life-sustaining therapies for patients with rare and complex diseases, is creating state-of-the-art, digitally-connected donation centers and modernizing the donor experience, optimizing the plasma collection process. Takeda’s plans to increase its plasma collection and manufacturing capacity by at least 65% by 2024 are geared towards expanding access to essential medicines and accelerating new treatments for patients.

Over the next three years, Takeda anticipates creating hundreds of new jobs in specialized roles in emerging data and digital fields, accessing new talent pools, and upskilling thousands of employees to propel its data and digital capabilities.