Genentech and NVIDIA enter into strategic AI research collaboration

Both companies will use their platforms to accelerate drug discovery and development

Genentech has announced it has entered into a multi-year strategic artificial intelligence (AI) research collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate drug discovery and development.

The research aims to accelerate both companies’ platforms and create innovations to be applied in healthcare and beyond.

The collaboration will aim to leverage Genentech’s advanced AI research programmes by transforming its generative AI models and algorithms to create a next-generation AI platform to deliver novel therapies and medicines to patients.

Both companies will optimise and accelerate Genentech’s machine learning algorithms and model on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud, a training-as-a-service platform built upon NVIDIA’s AI supercomputing and software, including NVIDIA BioNemo for generative AI applications in drug discovery.

Currently, Genentech is developing and leveraging AI and machine learning foundational models in several research areas, including diverse therapeutic modalities.

The company hopes that the collaboration will provide new insights for target and drug discovery, potentially answering fundamental questions about human biology and disease.

Genentech’s teams of computational scientists will utilise NVIDIA’s computing expertise to optimise and scale Genentech’s current models, which could potentially improve or enhance NVIDIA’s platforms.

Additionally, the collaboration will help Genentech’s “lab in a loop” to feed extensive experimental data to computational models to uncover patterns and make new, experimentally testable predictions to develop better therapies.

As part of the deal, Genentech will control the sharing of its proprietary data and NVIDIA will not gain direct access to Genentech’s proprietary data unless granted by the company throughout the course of the project.

Aviv Regev, executive vice president and head of Genentech Research and Early Development, said: “By harnessing the power of AI models and algorithms… we’re unlocking scientific discoveries with incredible speed and generating insights at an unprecedented scale.”

Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, said: “[The] collaboration… will dramatically accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development.”