NVIDIA and Genentech Partner to Accelerate Drug Discovery with Generative AI

This industry-first collaboration will optimize the platforms of both companies and bring potential drugs to patients more quickly.

Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, is pioneering the use of generative AI to discover and develop new treatments, enabling more efficient delivery of therapies to patients.

Genentech, a Pioneer in the Biotech Field, Collaborates with NVIDIA to Transform Drug Discovery and Development by Optimizing and Accelerating Genentech's Proprietary Algorithms Through the Integration of Expert Resources from Both Parties.

NVIDIA will provide accelerated models for Genentech on NVIDIA DGX Cloud. NVIDIA DGX Cloud offers dedicated instances of AI supercomputing and software hosted by NVIDIA's cloud service provider partners.

NVIDIA BioNeMo can help biotech companies customize models on a large scale. Genentech plans to adopt NVIDIA BioNeMo and directly integrate the BioNeMo cloud application programming interface into computational drug discovery workflows.

BioNeMo, now generally available as a training service, is a domain-specific platform that simplifies, accelerates, and scales generative AI applications for computational drug discovery. It allows researchers to pretrain or fine-tune state-of-the-art models on DGX Cloud.

This collaboration will initially focus on optimizing Genentech's AI models for drug discovery within its Lab Closed-Loop Framework, aiming to enable researchers to understand complex biomolecular patterns and relationships, truly revolutionize drug discovery, increase R&D success rates, and empower scientists to deliver extensive multiplier benefits—rather than linear or additive benefits—for patients and the healthcare ecosystem.

"Aviv Regev, Executive Vice President of Genentech and Head of Research and Early Development, stated, 'Our collaboration with NVIDIA builds on our long history of successfully inventing and deploying groundbreaking technologies. We were the first biotech company to leverage molecular biology for drug discovery and development, which transformed the world, and we also pioneered antibody therapies that have become paradigms. Now, by combining AI, labs, and clinics, we are uncovering patterns in vast amounts of data that cannot be found through other means, and designing experiments to test in patients. Partnering with NVIDIA and incorporating generative AI will significantly accelerate the discovery and design of treatments, improving the lives of patients around the world.'"

Simplifying Drug Discovery Through Computation

Currently, the discovery and development of drugs is a long, complex, and expensive process. Drug targets for new medicines are difficult to predict, and successfully developing a potential therapeutic molecule is equally challenging. AI can play a revolutionary role as generative and other AI models can be trained on large-scale datasets, helping scientists quickly identify potential drug molecules and interactions.

For Genentech, the use of AI helps bridge the gap between laboratory experiments and computational algorithms.

As Genentech's R&D organization, the Research and Early Development department has already completed a significant amount of work using AI across various models to discover and develop new treatments while gaining a better understanding of the fundamentals of biology and disease.

Genentech and NVIDIA's teams will collaborate to optimize Genentech's custom-developed models, aiming to shorten the time-consuming drug discovery and development process and achieve greater success.

Introducing AI into the Closed Loop

Genentech's "Lab Closed Loop" is an iterative framework for generating and exploring molecular designs with predictive properties. It aims to leverage experimental data to enhance generative computational models and optimize future molecular designs more effectively. By accelerating the training and inference of Genentech's drug discovery models, NVIDIA will help Genentech optimize this framework.

Through this collaboration, NVIDIA's AI experts will gain deep insights into the AI-related challenges in drug discovery and development. NVIDIA plans to use these insights to enhance BioNeMo and other platforms to further meet the requirements of models used in the biotech industry.

NVIDIA Vice President of Healthcare Kimberly Powell stated, "AI can play a revolutionary role in accelerating drug discovery and development, just as it has in many areas of healthcare and life sciences. NVIDIA and Genentech are jointly developing and implementing AI models and algorithms that enable us to rapidly iterate and uncover deep insights, driving scientific innovation."