What You Should Know:
– Genentech and NVIDIA today announced a multi-year strategic research collaboration that couples Genentech’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, extensive biological and molecular datasets, and research expertise with NVIDIA’s world-leading accelerated computing capabilities and AI to speed up drug discovery and development.
– The collaboration is designed to significantly enhance Genentech’s advanced AI research programs by transforming its generative AI models and algorithms into a next-generation AI platform, expediting the discovery and delivery of novel therapies and medicines to people.
Unlock Scientific Innovation and Empower R&D
The companies will join forces to accelerate and optimize Genentech’s proprietary machine learning (ML) 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.
The collaboration will also help accelerate Genentech’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. 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.
The Emerging Role of AI in Drug Discovery & Development
Drug discovery and development is currently a lengthy, complicated, and uncertain process. Targets for novel medicines are difficult to predict, as is successfully developing a molecule as a potential therapeutic. Genentech believes that AI plays an invaluable role in revolutionizing drug development, in combination with people, science and technology, helping make it more predictable and cost-effective, boosting the success rate of R&D over the long term, and ultimately helping discover and design therapeutics to improve people’s lives.
“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,” said Aviv Regev, EVP and head of Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED). “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.”
