NVIDIA and Lilly are placing collectively “a blueprint for what is feasible in the way forward for drug discovery,” NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang instructed attendees at a hearth chat Monday with Dave Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly.
The dialog — which befell in the course of the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Convention in San Francisco — centered on the announcement of a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab by NVIDIA and Lilly.
“We’re systematically bringing collectively a number of the brightest minds within the subject of drug discovery and a number of the brightest minds in laptop science,” Huang stated. “We’re going to have a lab the place the experience and the dimensions of that lab is ample to draw individuals who actually wish to do their life’s work at that intersection.”
The initiative will deliver collectively Lilly’s world-leading experience within the pharmaceutical business with NVIDIA’s management in AI to deal with one in every of humanity’s best challenges: modeling the complexities of biology. The 2 firms will collectively make investments as much as $1 billion in expertise, infrastructure and compute over 5 years to help the brand new lab, which will likely be primarily based within the San Francisco Bay Space.

Throughout the fireplace chat, Ricks mirrored on the painstaking work of drug discovery and AI’s potential to remodel the cycle of pharmaceutical invention.
“Every small molecule discovery is sort of a murals,” he stated. “If we will make that an engineering downside, versus this kind of discovery, this artisanal drug-making downside, consider the impression on human life.”
The lab will function underneath a scientist-in-the-loop framework, the place agentic moist labs are tightly linked to computational dry labs in a steady studying system. This framework goals to allow experiments, information technology and AI mannequin improvement to constantly inform and enhance each other.
“Machines are made to work day and night time to resolve this downside,” Ricks stated.
The co-innovation lab builds on Lilly’s beforehand introduced AI supercomputer — the biopharma business’s strongest AI manufacturing facility, an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 programs — which is able to practice large-scale biomedical basis and frontier fashions for drug discovery and improvement.
By integrating AI into drug discovery, Ricks defined, pharmaceutical researchers can quickly simulate a large variety of potential molecules, check them at scale in silico and filter out promising candidates. The subsequent problem is to seek out extra organic targets utilizing AI.
“The holy grail is that you simply put these two issues collectively, and we will mannequin the entire system directly,” Ricks stated.

Huang and Ricks additionally mentioned Lilly’s lengthy historical past of harnessing computing for pharmaceutical analysis — and the way ailments of the getting older mind are the following frontier for drug discovery.
“I can’t think about a extra worthy subject to use laptop science to,” Huang stated. “Hopefully we will bend the arc of historical past.”
NVIDIA at J.P. Morgan Healthcare
NVIDIA’s full-stack AI platform is accelerating the creation and deployment of main basis fashions throughout digital biology and drug discovery. To acknowledge a number of the latest developments, Huang raised a toast at J.P. Morgan Healthcare in honor of a couple of dozen leaders within the subject — and the AI fashions they’ve pioneered.
“Within the final 10 years, we’ve superior AI 1 million instances,” Huang stated. “I consider that over the following 10 years, you’ll get pleasure from the identical journey that I’ve loved in our technology … and so for every one in every of you — on your glad new 12 months current and a thanks for all the things that you simply do for the business and for the way forward for humanity — I give to you a DGX Spark.”

The honorees included:
- Zach Carpenter, CEO of VantAI, developer of the Neo mannequin household for co-folding and design throughout all organic molecules.
- Gabriele Corso, CEO of Boltz, creator of some of the well-established open-source households of biomolecular fashions.
- Evan Feinberg, CEO of Genesis Molecular AI, which developed Pearl, a protein and small molecule construction prediction mannequin.
- Chris Gibson and Najat Khan, chairman and CEO, respectively, of Recursion, which developed the OpenPhenom imaginative and prescient transformer mannequin for microscopy information.
- Glen Gowers, CEO of Basecamp Analysis, creator of EDEN, a biodiversity-scale genome language mannequin household.
- Brian Hie, innovation investigator on the Arc Institute, which was a serious collaborator within the improvement of Evo 2, a part of the Evo household of DNA language fashions.
- Max Jaderberg, president of Isomorphic, which is extending the capabilities of AlphaFold, the defining household of protein construction and interplay fashions.
- Simon Kohl, CEO of Latent Labs, developer of the Latent-X household of generative fashions for protein sequence and construction.
- Joshua Meier, CEO of Chai Discovery, which developed the Chai household of generative AI fashions for molecular construction prediction and design.
- Tom Miller, cofounder and CEO of Iambic Therapeutics, developer of the NeuralPLexer mannequin household for versatile, correct and quick construction prediction for proteins and small molecules.
- Alex Rives, head of science at Biohub, which created the ESM household of main protein language fashions.
- Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medication, which constructed Pharma.AI, an built-in mannequin suite spanning goal discovery, generative chemistry and medical prediction.
At J.P. Morgan Healthcare, NVIDIA additionally introduced a serious growth of the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform for AI-driven biology and drug discovery with instruments together with:
- NVIDIA Clara open fashions for predicting RNA constructions and making certain AI-designed medicine are sensible to synthesize.
- BioNeMo Recipes to speed up and scale organic basis mannequin coaching, customization and deployment.
- BioNeMo information processing libraries corresponding to nvMolKit, a GPU-accelerated cheminformatics device for molecular design.
NVIDIA additionally highlighted a collaboration with instrumentation chief Thermo Fisher to construct autonomous lab infrastructure utilizing NVIDIA’s full-stack AI computing — and highlighted the work of Multiply Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that provides end-to-end robotic programs to automate cell remedy manufacturing at scale.
J.P. Morgan Healthcare is the world’s largest healthcare funding symposium, attracting over 8,000 world professionals together with buyers, policymakers and executives from throughout the healthcare business.
For extra from the convention, take heed to the audio recording and view the presentation deck of a particular tackle by Kimberly Powell, vice chairman of healthcare at NVIDIA, who discusses AI’s impression throughout healthcare.