THOUSAND OAKS, California — Amgen's newly appointed Director of AI & Data Science Centre of Excellence, Madhur Sarin, on Wednesday outlined an ambitious roadmap for integrating artificial intelligence across the biotechnology giant's drug discovery and clinical development operations, signalling a significant acceleration in the company's digital transformation strategy.

Sarin, who formally joined Amgen earlier this week, told attendees at a company briefing that the AI CoE would focus on three near-term priorities: building scalable machine learning infrastructure capable of processing genomic and proteomic datasets, reducing the time between target identification and clinical candidate selection, and deploying AI-driven safety monitoring tools across ongoing Phase II and Phase III trials. The announcement comes as Amgen manages a pipeline of more than two dozen molecules in active clinical development.

Industry analysts welcomed the move, noting that Amgen's investment in a dedicated AI leadership role places it alongside peers such as AstraZeneca and Pfizer, both of which have established AI centres in recent years. 'The appointment of a senior AI director with a mandate to build scalable platforms — rather than isolated pilots — is the structural step that separates genuine transformation from incremental tinkering,' said one analyst at a San Francisco-based life sciences research firm.

Sarin is expected to work closely with Amgen's existing data engineering teams based in Thousand Oaks and its recently expanded technology hub in Hyderabad, India, where a portion of the company's data science workforce is concentrated. Early priorities are understood to include a partnership evaluation with cloud providers to expand high-performance computing capacity for protein structure prediction workflows, building on publicly available tools such as DeepMind's AlphaFold.

Amgen's move reflects a broader trend in the pharmaceutical sector, where AI-driven platforms are increasingly seen as critical to offsetting rising R&D costs and long development timelines. With blockbuster drugs including Repatha and Evenity facing biosimilar competition in coming years, investors have closely watched Amgen's pipeline strategy. Wednesday's briefing provided the first substantive signal that AI infrastructure will play a central role in how the company fills that gap over the next decade.