Novo Nordisk and tech giant NVIDIA have joined forces on a new project that aims to speed up drug discovery, applying generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to the design and building of new therapies.
The companies have said they will create customised AI models and agents that Novo Nordisk can use for early research and clinical development, with the application of advanced simulation as well as ‘physical AI’ technologies that can understand spatial relationships and physical behaviours in the three-dimensional world.
AI has emerged as a transformative force in the life sciences industry thanks to its ability to process large-scale datasets, uncover patterns, and generate predictions, and it is already being used to find drug targets, design new drugs, and repurpose existing therapies, among other applications.
Earlier this year, the FDA published its first guidance on how to detail AI use in regulatory filings, while last September the EMA also set out its thinking in this area via a reflection paper (PDF) on how AI can be used in the medicinal product lifecycle.
Discussing the Novo Nordisk alliance, NVIDIA’s senior director of business development for life sciences, Rory Kelleher, said: “AI is essential for every industry, and there’s no other field that will benefit more from acceleration than drug discovery.”
Novo Nordisk researchers will focus on several AI research programs, including using single-cell models to predict cellular responses to drug candidates and structures, as well as designing models to build molecules with drug-like properties, according to the two companies.
The companies will also collaborate on tapping into Novo Nordisk’s scientific literature to build biomedical large language models (LLMs) in the hope of helping researchers to uncover correlations between genes, proteins, and diseases.
Novo Nordisk has access to Denmark’s Gefion supercomputer, operated by the Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI), for use in its AI projects. Thanks to the new alliance, it will also use NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform, first launched in 2022, which NVIDIA says “simplifies, accelerates, and scales” GenAI applications for computational drug discovery. Other drugmakers tapping into BioNeMo include Roche/Genentech.
“We aim to build custom models that will aid our scientists in developing new medicines faster and more efficiently,” said Mishal Patel, senior vice president, AI and digital innovation at Novo Nordisk. “Gefion will allow us to run experiments at an unprecedented scale.”