At Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022 in Barcelona, attendees were treated to a slew of exciting product announcements and technology exhibitions. But it was the innovations in the healthcare sector that took the spotlight.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a rise in the adoption of healthcare technologies. These hold much promise in enabling the healthcare industry to combat this highly infectious disease, accelerate drug and vaccine research and development (R&D) processes, and deliver data-driven healthcare services to patients.
According to a recent survey of over 100 healthcare leaders, conducted by McKinsey, 90% of respondents agreed that the pandemic will fundamentally change the way they do business -driving new products, services, processes, and business models. The rising role of data-backed intelligence within healthcare paved the way for greater innovations, one of which is HUAWEI CLOUD and its intelligence-driven R&D platform Huawei Enterprise Intelligence Health (EIHealth).
Making strides in COVID-19 drug development and testing
Powered by HUAWEI CLOUD, Huawei EIHealth, which attracted crowds at the MWC, is an intelligent R&D platform that features industry-leading intelligence algorithm iPhord, as well as auto machine learning tool AutoOmics. It is currently being used to accelerate genome analysis research, drug development, and image analyses.
One of Huawei ElHealth’s first major contributions to the medical community was to help researchers discover potential COVID-19 drugs from existing drug-like compound libraries. To achieve this, Huawei ElHealth used homology modelling to obtain the 3D structure of 15 target proteins of SARS-CoV-2. It then leveraged computer-aided virtual drug screening to discover potentially effective drugs from massive libraries comprising hundreds of millions of small molecule compounds.
These discoveries were shared with research institutions and hospitals for free, encouraging further research.
Accelerating drug R&D with the Pangu Drug Molecule Model
At MWC 2022, one of the exhibition’s highlights was the large-scale model of HUAWEI CLOUD drug molecules. Outside of the work done involving COVID-19, HUAWEI CLOUD is also making outstanding progress in drug R&D. The company recently collaborated with Professor Liu Bing from Imperial College London to develop a broad-spectrum antibiotic. This research was enabled by the Pangu Drug Molecule Model, which uses the data gathered from the chemical structures of over 1.7 billion drug-like molecules to generate new drug molecules and predict their biochemical properties.
Apart from reducing the drug R&D cycle from years to only one month, it has also delivered significant R&D savings of about 70%. The structure optimizer of the Pangu drug molecule model further allows R&D teams to ease the side effects of broad-spectrum antibiotics on human cells and safeguard the health of patients.
ElHealth is also being used in various phases of drug R&D processes, including large molecule antibody optimization, protein structure prediction, multi-omics data analysis, and biomarker discoveries. The solution’s intelligence is leading to new drugs and therapies being developed more quickly and cost-effectively and has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year when used to develop new lifesaving medications like antibiotics that work on drug-resistant bacteria.
Everything-as-a-Service to accelerate more innovations
HuaweiStriving to dive into digital and providing “Everything-as-a-Service”, William Dong, Marketing Director of HUAWEI CLOUD said, “We are deeply engaged in Digitalization-as-a-Service.” HUAWEI CLOUD shares Huawei's outstanding technological innovations with enterprise customers to promote new growth and sees Everything-as-a-Service as these three key pillars:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service: With HUAWEI CLOUD, businesses can expand their data centers and networks wherever they are in the world, and to wherever they’re going. HUAWEI CLOUD works with partners to operate 61 availability zones (AZs) in 27 geographic regions, covering more than 170 countries and regions
- Technology-as-a-Service: Enterprises can leverage Huawei’s technologies on HUAWEI CLOUD, allowing them to accelerate innovation, without needing to reinvent the wheel
- Expertise-as-a-Service: HUAWEI CLOUD and its partners help organizations with their digital transformation efforts by sharing their experience and expertise
HUAWEI CLOUD is committed to building the cloud foundation for an intelligent world with ubiquitous cloud computing and pervasive intelligence.
To demonstrate this, HUAWEI CLOUD offered its services to Sociedad Argentina de Emergencias (SAE), a top healthcare organization in Argentina. SAE migrated its core systems (including remote diagnosis and treatment), patients’ medical data, drug management and ambulance scheduling to Huawei Cloud. It also leveraged big data, IoT, and intelligence to automate the scheduling of medical resources of 29 hospitals and hundreds of community medical service stations in Buenos Aires. This has enabled the organization to provide better healthcare services to 17 million people.
HUAWEI CLOUD draws on Huawei’s over 30 years of expertise in ICT technologies, products, and solutions to provide customers with reliable, secure, and sustainable cloud services in healthcare, as well as other industries.
To learn more about HUAWEI CLOUD, click here.