It’s not every day you see two giants from completely different worlds team up like this. But that’s exactly what is happening with NVIDIA and Eli Lilly. The tech heavyweight and the pharmaceutical leader are joining forces to build a first-of-its-kind AI lab in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The plan is for the two companies to invest up to $1 billion over the next five years. They are bringing Lilly’s experts in biology and medicine together with NVIDIA’s top AI engineers. The goal is to have these teams work side-by-side to figure out how to discover drugs faster and fix some of the biggest headaches in the pharmaceutical industry.
“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “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.”
A Continuous AI Learning System
The collaboration is going to focus on something they call a “continuous learning system.”
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They want to tightly connect Lilly’s physical labs (the “wet” labs) with computational “dry” labs. This allows for 24/7 experimentation. The AI helps the biologists run experiments, and the data from those experiments helps the AI get smarter. They will use the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform to build these new models for biology and chemistry.
“For nearly 150 years, we’ve been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients,” said David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly. “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.”
“By bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, we’re creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone.”
Robots and Digital Twins
Lilly plans to use this partnership to improve manufacturing using robotics and digital twins. By using NVIDIA Omniverse, they can build a complete digital replica of a manufacturing line. This lets them stress-test the supply chain and fix problems in a simulation before they make any physical changes in the real world.
The lab is expected to start work in South San Francisco early this year.
