Nvidia and Eli Lilly and Co. are partnering to build an artificial intelligence-powered laboratory in Silicon Valley, a push to deepen AI technology's influence in biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry.
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The two companies plan to invest up to $1B in infrastructure and talent over the next five years. Construction is expected to begin in South San Francisco early this year, according to a Monday announcement.
The partnership aims to generate large-scale data and build AI models that may accelerate medicine development, using Nvidia BioNeMo, a platform for biology and drug discovery.
“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “NVIDIA and Lilly are bringing together the best of our industries to invent a new blueprint for drug discovery — one where scientists can explore vast biological and chemical spaces in silico before a single molecule is made.”
It isn’t clear where the new lab would be developed. Lilly's Gateway Labs incubator occupies two buildings in South San Francisco, 681 Gateway Blvd. and 201 Haskins Way, both owned by Alexandria Real Estate Equities.
Nvidia and Lilly are already partnering on an “AI factory,” a supercomputer system that allows researchers to train AI programs. The machine, announced in October, is housed at Lilly’s Indianapolis headquarters and is expected to be launched in the first quarter, according to Bloomberg.
Models created by the AI factory will be available to biotech companies via Lilly TuneLab. Lilly values its proprietary data on which the drug discovery models are built at $1B.
If the partnership is successful, the two may be able to speed up the time it takes to deliver cures to patients and reduce costs in the development process. It now takes an average of 10 years to bring a drug to the market, Lilly Chief Information and Digital Officer Diogo Rau previously told CNBC.
In addition to drug discovery, Nvidia and Lilly plan to explore ways to use AI in clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations to enhance the supply chain and better produce medications.
“Combining our volumes of data and scientific knowledge with NVIDIA’s computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it,” Lilly Chair and CEO David Ricks said in a statement. “By bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, we’re creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone.”
Also on Monday, Nvidia announced it is partnering with another biotech firm, Thermo Fisher Scientific, to develop technology to make research labs autonomous.
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