Genentech and Nvidia Enter Into Strategic AI Research Collaboration to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development
In a move aimed at speeding up drug discovery and development, Genentech announced a multi-year strategic research collaboration with Nvidia.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The partnership will combine Genentech’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, biological and molecular datasets, and research expertise with Nvidia's accelerated computing capabilities and AI. The collaboration aims to enhance Genentech’s AI research programs by transforming its generative AI models and algorithms into a next-generation AI platform, potentially expediting the discovery and delivery of novel therapies and medicines to people.
The companies say the move will accelerate and optimize Genentech’s proprietary machine learning algorithms and models on Nvidia DGX Cloud, which provides a training-as-a-service platform built on dedicated Nvidia AI supercomputing and software, including Nvidia BioNemo for generative AI applications in drug discovery.
Nvidia will share its computing expertise with Genentech’s teams of computational scientists with the goal of optimizing and scaling Genentech’s models, and in that process, may improve or enhance Nvidia's platforms.
“By harnessing the power of AI models and algorithms, with our unique data and experiments, we're unlocking scientific discoveries with incredible speed and generating insights at an unprecedented scale,” Aviv Regev, EVP and head of Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED), said in a company news release. “Bringing science and technology together has always been a foundation of biomedical breakthroughs at Genentech. We are thrilled to join forces with Nvidia to further optimize our drug discovery and development to deliver treatments that transform people’s lives.”
“The greatest impact of generative AI is to revolutionize the life science and healthcare industry,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Our collaboration to create Genentech’s next-generation AI platform will dramatically accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development.”
Genentech also said the collaboration will help the company's “lab in a loop,” where extensive experimental data feeds computational models that uncover patterns and make new, experimentally testable predictions. Scientists quickly assess these predictions in the lab and the results are fed back into the models to improve the underlying computational model, allowing for iterative development of better therapies. Activities will leverage publicly available and Genentech-proprietary data. Genentech will control the sharing of its proprietary data and Nvidia will not have direct access to Genentech’s proprietary data unless granted by Genentech for use in a particular project during the term of that project.