New York — Healthcare investment firm Deerfield Management has made Amazon Web Services a preferred artificial intelligence provider for itself and selected portfolio companies, under a collaboration to help AI-native healthcare and life sciences businesses grow.
The tie-up joins AWS's generative AI and cloud services with two parts of the Deerfield network: the AI engineers at Deerfield Intelligence, the firm's data, technology and AI arm, and Cure, the firm's affiliate and a healthcare innovation campus in New York City. According to Deerfield, the goal is for chosen portfolio companies to put agentic AI systems to work in drug discovery, operational automation and care delivery.
Deerfield also plans to apply the arrangement to its own business. The firm said it would build AWS AI services into the way it carries out research, evaluates opportunities and runs its operations, so the collaboration reaches beyond the products its portfolio companies develop.
Two internal units stand to benefit first. Deerfield Intelligence and Deerfield Discovery and Development (3DC), which acts as the firm's in-house research and development engine, will get AWS AI and cloud technology plus technical support. They will use it to scale Deerfield's proprietary healthcare AI products and to pass AI capabilities on to portfolio companies that want them.
Selected portfolio companies will receive access to the same AWS technology, with technical enablement and training attached. The subjects Deerfield listed include large-scale model training, inference optimization and managed services built specifically for healthcare.
Dan Sheeran, Vice President and General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, said: “This collaboration aims to drive the development of the next generation of AI-powered healthcare organizations. With support from AWS, interested Deerfield portfolio companies can be equipped with AI services specific to supporting healthcare and life sciences needs like Amazon Bio Discovery, as well as agentic services like Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to build AI agents and support organizations at a scale that wouldn't have been feasible only a few years ago.”
AWS introduced Amazon Bio Discovery in April 2026 as an application that lets scientists work with biological foundation models, which are trained on large biological datasets to generate and score potential drug molecules. Researchers can send promising antibody candidates to lab partners such as Twist Bioscience and Ginkgo Bioworks for synthesis and testing, and AWS says 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies run sensitive research workloads on its cloud.
In one early project with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the tool was used to design nearly 300,000 novel antibody molecules, of which the top 100,000 went to Twist Bioscience for testing. AWS said the work took weeks, against up to a year with traditional design methods. AWS counts Bayer, the Broad Institute, Fred Hutch Cancer Center and Voyager Therapeutics as other early users.
Jim Flynn, Managing Partner at Deerfield, said: “Deerfield is working to build an ambitious AI-native platform in healthcare. Our Intelligence team is developing models that aim to transform how we source opportunities, evaluate science, and accelerate portfolio companies. With access to AWS healthcare services, we hope to empower companies to accelerate their development timelines as they build their own clinical solutions.”
Deerfield backs more than 200 private and public healthcare and life sciences investments, according to Fierce Healthcare. In May 2025, the firm unveiled the third installment of its healthcare innovations fund, setting aside more than $600 million for therapeutics and technologies.
Some of the work is already under way. Ascertain, a healthcare technology company in Deerfield's portfolio, runs its agentic AI platform on AWS services. The platform automates complex clinical and administrative tasks such as case management and prior authorization, an approach the release sets against simply making legacy processes a little more efficient.
Mark Michalski, M.D., Chief Information Officer at Deerfield and CEO of Ascertain, said: “We built Ascertain to give clinicians time back by automating the administrative burden in care, and we believe AWS's purpose-built services for the healthcare industry will help us scale these capabilities. We believe Deerfield's collaboration with AWS and the AI and cloud services it makes available to Ascertain and other portfolio companies is part of a foundation with the potential to make AI-driven transformation possible at scale.”
Deerfield presents the AWS deal as the latest step in its history of backing healthcare companies. Its headquarters is at Cure, which the firm places at the heart of one of the world's densest healthcare clusters, with leading academic medical centers, a growing biotech sector and a deep pool of clinicians and investors nearby. The team counts more than 190 professionals, over 60 of them holding MD, JD or PhD degrees.
The announcement came on the same day AWS launched its Health Impact Initiative, which commits $100 million over five years in AI, agent tools and cloud capacity to groups working to close health gaps in underserved communities. The two moves could deepen AWS's reach among early-stage health companies that may later become larger cloud customers.
AWS has used similar models with startups in the Gulf. Its partnership with MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi tied the university's incubator to the AWS Activate program, giving connected startups cloud credits, technical support and mentoring.
The next visible step is in New York, where Deerfield and AWS plan to co-host joint programming at Cure and turn the campus into a shared hub for the healthcare innovation community.
