How collaboration sparks innovation, transforming patient outcomes. Illustrations by Ibrahim Rayintakath The Human Side of Tech-Enabled Healthcare

The Atlantic

14-04-2025

or decades, doctors, scientists, and engineers developing new treatments and advanced medical technologies have faced seemingly insurmountable challenges: diseases that are difficult to detect, injuries that can be only partially healed by available surgeries, and conditions without effective cures.
Today, health and tech partnerships are changing all that.
By harnessing new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud computing, health-care and technology companies are collaborating to tackle health care's most complex challenges. They're also doing it faster and more effectively than ever before.
7,000
Johnson & Johnson, while primarily known as America's leading healthcare company, now employs nearly 7,000 digital specialists and data scientists.
For example, in the past, researchers trying to develop a breakthrough drug often had to do immense amounts of trial-and-error lab work to discover a single molecule with the potential to treat a disease. Now, AI is helping to crunch vast quantities of data so they can more efficiently make decisions in developing lifesaving medicines.
'Using AI, we can analyze our data in a number of different ways, finding subtle signals that we didn't see by conventional methods,' says Justin Scheer, the vice president of In Silico Discovery at Johnson & Johnson. 'This can shave years off the process, and for an oncology patient who doesn't have years, that can make all the difference in the world.'
Johnson & Johnson, while primarily known as the United States' leading health-care company, now employs nearly 7,000 digital specialists and data scientists. It also collaborates with cloud computing and AI pioneers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use cutting-edge technologies to supercharge its medical discoveries. By uniting science and technology—and two American companies that are global leaders in their respective industries—Johnson & Johnson is accelerating the discovery, development, and delivery of life-changing medicines and medical technology, helping to solve health-care challenges once thought unsolvable.
'Today, we've reached the point where innovation in health care depends upon innovation in technology,' says Jim Swanson, Johnson & Johnson's chief information officer. 'It's a perfect blend of capabilities that will guide us to a deeper understanding of diseases and conditions and offer breakthroughs in smarter, more personalized treatments.'
Accelerating Drug Discoveries
Innovative partnerships have always been at the heart of medical progress. From health-care providers and researchers to governments and academia, collaboration fuels innovation.
Now, health and tech players are combining deep scientific expertise with the power of data to tackle some of health care's most complex challenges, including developing lifesaving medicines. Despite remarkable advancements, roughly 90 percent of clinical drugs never make it to the market. Improving that number is critical to changing the lives of patients waiting for new therapies.
Johnson & Johnson is working to develop treatments faster and more effectively than ever before. The key to this is data—and Johnson & Johnson has decades of it.
The 139-year-old company has collected anonymized information from patients and clinical-trial results. With that, Johnson & Johnson has built a massive chemical library, in which each molecule is labeled with bioactivity data—detailed insights on how a molecule interacts with different biological systems. Researchers need this information to identify promising candidates to develop into novel treatments.
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To help accomplish that, the company has created a biosignature platform that offers medical scientists a holistic view of how new molecules affect biology. Data is fed into AI and ML algorithms to help them create biosignatures—essentially unique fingerprints for biological activity—which help scientists visualize and understand the effects of new molecules on different parts of a cell. Those biosignatures are then combined with existing data to infer hypotheses and make more accurate predictions about bioactivity.
This process requires a massive amount of computing power, which is where tech companies like AWS come into play. Johnson & Johnson works with them to merge medical know-how with high-performance computing power and cloud capabilities to accelerate breakthroughs in some of the hardest-to-treat areas.
'By establishing strong data foundations in the cloud, health-care and life-sciences organizations can rapidly experiment and innovate, empowering their teams to work smarter while maintaining the highest standards of security and privacy,' says Dan Sheeran, the general manager of health care and life science at AWS.
These tools give us the right data at the right time.
–Ryan Donahoe, Head of R&D, Orthopaedics, Johnson & Johnson MedTech
Already, the biosignature platform has enabled Johnson & Johnson to test more than 2 million compounds across 40 different cellular disease models, generating more than 15 million images to identify novel starting points and help optimize drug candidates. All in all, this process is having a huge impact by allowing scientists to more quickly single out patterns for drug discovery.
'Ultimately, this process reduces the number of iterations, helping us reach the best outcome for patients and do it faster,' says Scheer.
For instance, the medical scientists at Johnson & Johnson were studying a type of cancer, but they were not able to pinpoint compounds using traditional methods. 'We had no way of identifying the needles in the haystack, so to speak,' Scheer says. Using AI, however, the scientists made a digital replica of the cellular phenotype, compared it to the 2 million compounds in their library, and virtually determined drug starting points that elicit the same phenotype. 'A scientist couldn't have done this by looking in a microscope,' Scheer says. 'It's so detailed that you need the AI algorithm to pull out the signal.'
The biosignature project is still in its early phases, but it has the potential to offer entirely new treatments for cancer patients. As Scheer says, 'We're leveraging the world's data to make advances for health and humanity.'
Advancing Smarter, More Personalized Treatments
Digitalization efforts, like advanced AI, are not only supporting the creation of more targeted therapeutic drugs but also helping companies such as Johnson & Johnson develop more effective, personalized medical devices for patients.
Johnson & Johnson's orthopaedics research and development (R&D) team, for instance, is leveraging a suite of in silico (in or on a computer) tools and techniques to evaluate personalized hip and knee implants, predicting their feasibility under varied conditions prior to manufacturing a physical product.
With nearly 1.3 million knee replacements and up to 760,000 hip replacements performed on Americans each year, precise implant design is essential. In comparison with traditional R&D practices, in silico approaches like physics-based modeling and AI training on large datasets play a crucial role in accelerating innovation while improving outcomes, enhancing product quality and reducing time to market.
By utilizing high-performance computing environments, such as those powered by AWS's cloud-based infrastructure, the orthopaedics R&D team can efficiently scale compute resources to meet demands. These tools enable engineers to gain deeper insights into the safety, efficacy, and performance of their products through rapid iterations, as well as a better understanding of complex interactions.
'Imagine you're going in for a joint replacement surgery, a procedure that can transform how you live your life,' says Ryan Donahoe, head of R&D, Orthopaedics, at Johnson & Johnson MedTech. 'Having the right implant can make the difference for patients, allowing them to get moving again, which is why we constantly look to advance our product designs through these high-tech prototypes.'
We're leveraging the world's data to make advances for health and humanity.
–Justin Scheer, the vice president of In Silico Discovery at Johnson & Johnson
The Johnson & Johnson MedTech team is also developing innovations for health-care providers. Surgical environments, for instance, are being enhanced with high-performance computing so that doctors can review data from their tools after a procedure, collect insights, and use that information to enhance future performance.
'These tools give us the right data at the right time,' says Donahoe. 'Partnering with AWS on high-performance computing has really given us a framework to be able to scale faster solutions for patients.'
The promise of medical breakthroughs powered by technologies is only beginning to be realized. As health-care and tech companies continue to work together, they'll advance the discovery of new molecules to treat diseases and develop more personalized devices for patients.
'From powering advanced R&D in orthopaedics to enabling sophisticated drug discovery platforms and streamlining critical processes, cloud solutions are leading to the discovery of the next-generation treatments,' says Sheeran of AWS. 'It drives efficiency, reduces costs, and improves patient care while promoting U.S. competitiveness.'
Ultimately, the future of tech-enabled health care will benefit patients in profound ways—improving the future of treatment for all.
'It all comes down to our mission,' says Swanson. 'We're not just incrementally improving health care. We're committed to transforming it. To do that, you need the best science, best technology, and best people, and together with our partners, we have all three.'
Read more about this at johnsonandjohnson.com