Nvidia Announces Massive New Initiatives in Pharma And Clinical Research

Founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, announced today in his GTC Paris keynote that the company has inked two new large partnerships to advance the company’s work in healthcare and life-sciences.

The first is with European based global pharmaceutical giant, Novo Nordisk, to advance drug discovery and development efforts by leveraging an existing partnership with the Danish Centre for AI Innovation’s (DCAI) Gefion AI supercomputer. Novo Nordisk will utilize Gefion and a variety of Nvidia platforms such as BioNeMo, Nim, and Omniverse to build and develop customized AI models, foster agentic AI workflows and even create simulation and digital twin environments to advance physical AI applications. The primary goal will be to use these tools to better understand potential drug candidates and structures in order to build molecular models that can further the drug discovery and development pipeline.

Rory Kelleher, senior director of business development for life sciences at Nvidia, explains that drug discovery can claim massive benefits from generative AI, especially in the R&D space. Mishal Patel, senior vice president of AI and digital innovation at Novo Nordisk, comments that the combination of Gefion and Nvidia’s computing platforms is an unprecedented approach and will enable the building of custom models that can truly empower better efficiency and efficacy. More generally, Gefion is a computational behemoth and has been used by numerous enterprises to advance their computing capabilities; for example, Danish startup Teton has been working with Nvidia and Gefion to build out an AI care companion for clinical settings.

The second partnership that Nvidia announced today is with IQVIA to advance the use of AI agents in the clinical research and commercialization spaces. The companies will collaborate to launch multiple AI powered agents to accelerate pharmaceutical development workflows for biotech and medical device customers globally. Importantly, the new agents will be “orchestrator agents,” meaning that they will act as supervisors for groups of “sub-agents” that each have their own specialties; the supervising agent will route a received task to the appropriate sub-agent, enabling an efficient and automated workflow. Using this technology, IQVIA is hoping to tackle some of the hardest problems in the drug development and pharmaceutical workflows. For example, clinical trials often require a significant amount of work to launch and execute. Agents can help identify targets, develop a knowledge base using existing research databases and even review clinical data to better understand insights and automate the review process. Avinob Roy, vice president and general manager at IQVIA, explains that AI agents will transform the entire “molecule to market” lifecycle.

Overall, the news comes at a time when Nvidia’s reach into the AI ecosystem has been incredibly impactful. The company indicated in its latest quarterly report a continuing surge in demand for its GPUs and hardware ecosystem. Though most traditionally a hardware giant, it has also increasingly diversified its work into the cloud and software ecosystems, furthering its moat in the AI space.

Undoubtedly, there is stiff competition in the AI race. With regard to hardware alone, technology giants such as Google and Amazon depend heavily on Nvidia for its GPUs; however, the companies are also rapidly developing their own silicon products, such as Google’s work with tensor processing units (TPUs) and Amazon’s customized silicon products (i.e., Trainium, Graviton and Inferentia).

With regard to healthcare and life-sciences more broadly, all of the large technology hyperscalers are investing billions of dollars in these fields. For example, one of the most prominent success stories is Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs and its work with drug development models. Companies like Microsoft are also rolling out new enterprise grade tools and infrastructure capabilities to empower traditional life-science companies. Indeed, the innovation is rapid and unprecedented.

Despite the perception of a “competition” however, there is no need for a clear cut winner. The reality of this progress across the entire spectrum of technology companies is that ultimately, both the healthcare and life-sciences industries stand to gain immense benefits.