NVIDIA Joins Forces with Key Players to Revolutionize Genomics, Drug Discovery, and Healthcare Innovation

J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference—NVIDIA has today declared new collaborations aimed at reforming the $10 trillion healthcare and life sciences sector by expediting drug discovery, improving genomic research, and innovating advanced healthcare services with agentic and generative AI.

The amalgamation of AI, accelerated computing, and biological information is transforming healthcare into the largest technology sector. Healthcare pioneers IQVIA, Illumina, and Mayo Clinic, along with Arc Institute, are employing the latest NVIDIA technologies to formulate solutions that will enhance human health.

These solutions encompass AI agents that can expedite clinical trials by alleviating administrative loads, AI models that learn from biological tools to foster drug discovery and digital pathology, and physical AI robots for surgical procedures, patient surveillance, and operational processes. AI agents, AI instruments, and AI robots will assist in addressing the $3 trillion of operations dedicated to bolstering industry growth and create an AI manufacturing prospect in the hundreds of billions.

“AI presents an extraordinary chance to progress healthcare and life sciences with instruments that aid providers in detecting diseases earlier and identifying new treatments more rapidly,” stated Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “The integration of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing proficiencies with the capabilities of industry leaders is set to initiate a novel epoch of medical and biological innovation, enhancing patient outcomes globally.”

AI Foundry Services Accelerate Drug and Medical Device Development

IQVIA — a prominent worldwide provider of clinical research services, commercial insights, and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare sectors — is utilizing the NVIDIA AI Foundry service to construct custom foundation models using its more than 64 petabytes of data, combined with its extensive domain proficiency. The organization is also crafting agentic AI solutions, equipped with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software including NVIDIA NIM™ microservices and NVIDIA Blueprints, designed to enhance research, clinical development, and access to new therapies. IQVIA continues to lead in the ethically responsible employment of AI, ensuring that its AI-enabled capabilities remain rooted in privacy, regulatory compliance, and patient welfare.

“This signifies a considerable advancement in the application of AI to healthcare and life sciences,” expressed Bhavik Patel, president of commercial solutions at IQVIA. “We are enthusiastic about merging our best-in-class capabilities and a decade of experience in artificial intelligence with NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI technologies to construct new AI-driven solutions trained on premier healthcare information and optimized for life sciences workflows. This partnership will propel our mission to assist our clients in accelerating innovations and treatments to market.”

Illumina and NVIDIA Propel the Next Generation of Genomic Innovations

Illumina, a world-renowned leader in DNA sequencing and informatics solutions, is collaborating with NVIDIA to unleash the next wave of genomics for drug discovery and human health.

This collaboration will enable Illumina to harness NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AI resources for its multiomics analysis software and workflows. This will facilitate a deeper understanding and insights into the human genome for researchers, pharmaceuticals, and additional life sciences clients.

Illumina will provide DRAGEN analysis software on NVIDIA accelerated computing within the Illumina Connected Analytics framework. This integration aims to broaden the accessibility of DRAGEN globally, wherever NVIDIA’s computing infrastructure is present.

In the past five years, advancements in single-cell and spatial genomics have transformed drug discovery by offering unprecedented insights into cellular understanding. To further enlarge the genomics landscape and support breakthroughs in target identification, clinical development, and biomarker discovery, NVIDIA and Illumina plan to work together to advance multiomics data analysis on the Illumina Connected Analytics platform, in addition to crafting new biology foundation models.

Researchers and developers can more readily tap into rich genomic data by integrating NVIDIA RAPIDS™ accelerated data science software, included in the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite, along with the NVIDIA BioNeMo™ platform’s generative AI models and fine-tuning features for proprietary datasets, and MONAI for spatial imaging workflows. Illumina and NVIDIA will aim to make these tools available on the Illumina Connected Analytics platform.

“Our capacity to merge AI’s strength with multiomics data is revolutionizing our understanding of diseases,” stated Steve Barnard, chief technology officer at Illumina. “By uniting Illumina’s savvy in genomics data and analysis with NVIDIA’s robust AI frameworks, we aspire to empower pharmaceutical and biotech firms to unlock their own multiomics datasets to uncover transformative insights and enhance success rates in developing lifesaving therapies.”

Mayo Clinic’s AI-Driven Digital Pathology

Pathology, a crucial modality utilized by clinicians to diagnose and determine treatments for various cancers and other severe health conditions, is traditionally a slow and manual methodology. The Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology platform, constructed from autonomous robotic labs and advanced imaging technologies, presents a vast and distinctive dataset comprising 20 million whole-slide images paired with 10 million relevant patient records to facilitate the development of foundation models.

Mayo Clinic and NVIDIA will significantly accelerate the creation of next-generation pathology foundation models. Mayo Clinic is set to implement newly available NVIDIA DGX™ Blackwell systems — which are built on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and provide 1.4TB of GPU memory per system, ideal for processing digital pathology whole-slide datasets — alongside NVIDIA’s healthcare imaging platform MONAI.

Mayo Clinic and NVIDIA are at the forefront of this initiative to establish a foundation for future AI applications in drug discovery, personalized diagnostics, and therapies. The two entities will continue to broaden this partnership, utilizing Mayo’s clinical and AI knowledge combined with NVIDIA Cosmos Nemotron vision language models and NIM microservices to offer more personalized healthcare experiences, along with predictive and efficient treatment methodologies.

Expanding Open Science Biology AI Models With Arc Institute

Arc Institute, a research organization located in Palo Alto, California, that operates at the crossroads of biology and machine learning, is working alongside NVIDIA to develop and disseminate potent AI models and tools that advance biomedical discoveries.

The researchers at Arc, focusing on biology and machine learning, are collaborating with NVIDIA engineers to amplify the potential of foundation models in biology that can generalize across various modalities, including DNA, RNA, and proteins, and advance applications for drug discovery, synthetic biology across multiple scales of complexity, disease, and evolution research, and beyond.

As part of the partnership, NVIDIA is providing Arc Institute with expertise in extensive model development; the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform running on NVIDIA DGX Cloud for streamlined, optimized training; and NVIDIA NIM microservices and Blueprints.