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Roche Canada makes significant life sciences jobs investment in Ontario – Canada NewsWire

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Ontario leads the way, creating a positive ecosystem for business that competes internationally

MISSISSAUGA, ON, Oct. 16, 2020 /CNW/ – Hoffmann-La Roche Limited (Roche Canada) is pleased to announce a major jobs investment into Ontario’s life sciences industry. At a time when Canada and the world are looking to the sector to lead in testing, treatment and post-pandemic economic recovery, this investment will bring up to 500 highly skilled and specialized full-time positions to the province of Ontario. This $500 million investment over five years will establish Roche’s Global Pharma Technical (PT) Operations site at its Canadian pharmaceutical headquarters in Mississauga. By the end of 2020, Roche will have hired 200 skilled jobs and up to 300 more by the end of 2023. 

Ontario has been a leader when it comes to innovation and the hub of a growing life sciences sector that is recognized internationally. The current global health crisis has only reinforced the importance of strengthening life sciences, especially here in Canada. Life sciences and the bio economy drive the Canadian healthcare system, agriculture, food supply, environmental protection, and represent the greatest opportunity for economic growth in the province.

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Ontario was selected for this investment based on a strong competitive business environment, exceptional talent pool, and a government committed to fostering growth in the sector,” says Ronnie Miller, President & CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals, Canada. “We applaud the hard work done by the Government of Ontario and the Premier’s Office to foster a business environment that can compete internationally to attract investment opportunities, and Roche’s commitment to add up to 500 specialized positions is a direct result of these positive changes.”

Ontario is home to titans of research, development and innovation, who are leading the creation of life-saving medicines, treatment, and medical equipment,” says Premier Doug Ford. “Roche’s new operation hub in Mississauga will further anchor Ontario’s position as a global leader in life sciences, create good-paying jobs in the community, and ensure Ontario’s best and brightest minds advance the important work Roche does to transform health care here in our province and beyond.”

This opportunity places Ontario at the top of the list for potential future global investments across the life sciences sector. The investment will create new and exciting employment opportunities, including for recent graduates of Ontario’s strong academic ecosystem who will have the opportunity to impact the development of Roche’s medicines from early stages through to being supplied to patients around the world.

“As we move ahead in our post-pandemic recovery, today’s announcement is a positive signal that the life sciences sector is not only demonstrating our value in the fight against COVID-19 from a testing and treatment perspective, but also as an important economic driver for the province now, and as a growth opportunity for the future,” says Damian Siggins, Global Head, PT Transformation and Site Head, PT Operations. “Without the support of all three levels of government, the Mississauga Board of Trade, Life Sciences Ontario and Invest in Canada, who are all active advocates for a thriving sector, this investment would not have been possible.”

Ontario is home to leading edge research institutions, we have a top tier STEM workforce and our life science and innovation sectors are amongst the best in the world,” says Vic Fedeli, Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. “We are proud that Roche has expressed confidence in our province and selected Ontario as the home for their new site. This will mean 500 new well-paying jobs and will further bolster Ontario’s competitiveness in the life sciences sector.”

“I want to thank Roche for this significant investment in our city that will not only create hundreds of highly skilled jobs but position Mississauga on the road to recovery,” says Mississauga Mayor, Bonnie Crombie. “As home to Canada’s second-largest Life Sciences sector, I couldn’t be more proud that Roche has chosen to expand its operations in Mississauga. This investment will help bring new innovative products to patients in Canada and around the world and is yet another example of how innovation thrives in Mississauga.”

Roche is committed to continuing our investments in the Canadian healthcare ecosystem, but it is important to note that at a time when the world is looking to the life sciences sector for new therapeutics, vaccines, and diagnostics, the Federal government is implementing reforms that will limit our industry’s ability to deliver new innovations that Canadian patients need and are waiting for. Canada needs a regulatory environment that will help the sector and our citizens grow and thrive, while balancing system sustainability and equity.

About Roche
Roche is a global pioneer in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics focused on advancing science to improve people’s lives. The combined strengths of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics under one roof have made Roche the leader in personalized healthcare – a strategy that aims to fit the right treatment to each patient in the best way possible.

Roche is the world’s largest biotech company, with truly differentiated medicines in oncology, immunology, infectious diseases, ophthalmology and diseases of the central nervous system. Roche is also the world leader in in vitro diagnostics and tissue-based cancer diagnostics, and a frontrunner in diabetes management. 

Founded in 1931, Roche Canada is committed to searching for better ways to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases while making a sustainable contribution to society. The company employs more than 1,800 people across the country through its Pharmaceuticals division in Mississauga, Ontario and Diagnostics, as well as Diabetes Care divisions in Laval, Quebec.

Roche aims to improve patient access to medical innovations by working with all relevant stakeholders. Roche Canada is actively involved in local communities through its charitable giving and partnerships with organizations and healthcare institutions that work together to improve the quality of life of Canadians. For more information, please visit www.RocheCanada.com.

All trade-marks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

© Copyright 2020; Hoffmann-La Roche Limited

SOURCE Hoffmann-La Roche Limited (Roche Canada)

For further information: Yvonne Armstrong, Roche Canada, T: 905-542-6864, E: [email protected]

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http://www.rochecanada.com

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

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Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
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Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

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The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

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