Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, and hardware giant NVIDIA have sealed a multi-year research collaboration. In a strategic alliance, Genentech will leverage its expertise in AI and extensive biological datasets, teaming up with NVIDIA’s computing power and AI capabilities. The collaboration is to enhance Genentech’s machine learning algorithms through NVIDIA’s DGX Cloud—a platform specifically tailored for AI applications in drug discovery.

Under the leadership of CEO Jensen Huang, the move will not only improve Genentech’s scientific models but also potentially enhance NVIDIA’s broader platforms. Huang envisions this partnership as a catalyst for transformative change within the healthcare sector, particularly in expediting the drug discovery process.

This collaborative effort majorly supports Genentech’s AI and machine learning ML teams, who are actively developing foundational models spanning diverse therapeutic domains. Moreover, it speeds up the implementation of Genentech’s innovative “lab in a loop” strategy, where experimental data informs computational models. These models then generate predictions that undergo real-world testing in laboratories, subsequently feeding back results to enhance and refine the computational models in a continuous improvement cycle. 

In the course of their collaboration, both public and proprietary data from Genentech will be used with the company maintaining strict control over access to its private data. Notably, NVIDIA will not have direct access to Genentech’s proprietary data unless expressly permitted for a particular project.

NVIDIA also made waves earlier this year with the introduction of BioNeMo Cloud, an important component of its AI Foundations suite. This platform provides access to pre-trained AI models, a development that has already proven instrumental in expediting drug discovery processes for notable companies like Amgen and various startups.

Not just BioNeMo, NVIDIA also plays an important role in advancing drug discovery through its GPU-accelerated platform, NVIDIA Clara which integrates AI, data analysis, simulations, and visualisation to swiftly sift through extensive chemical libraries for potential drug candidates, modelling protein structures and dynamics to comprehend their roles and interactions with medications, crafting novel molecules with desired attributes, simulating drug effects within the human body, and visualising findings from drug discovery experiments.