NVIDIA and Lilly are teaming up to address challenges in drug discovery. The two companies announced that they plan to invest up to $1 billion in an artificial intelligence (AI) co-innovation lab over five years.
The lab, which will be located in San Francisco, will use a “scientist in the loop” framework and will provide “ a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists,” according to a press release.
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In addition to large amounts of compute power, the lab will use NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform to accelerate drug discovery. The project will allow create a feedback loop among experimentation, data generation and AI model development.
“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in the release. “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.”
NVIDIA and Lilly partnered last year on an AI factory for drug discovery powered by more than 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs.
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In addition to drug discovery, the companies will also work to apply AI “across clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations to integrate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics and digital twins,” according to the statement.
Digital twins will be used in the AI factory to replicate Lilly’s manufacturing lines to stress test, model and optimize its supply chain ahead of making real-world changes.
“Each small molecule discovery is like a work of art,” said Lilly CEO and chair Dave Ricks at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. “If we can make that an engineering problem, versus this sort of discovery, this artisanal drug-making problem, think of the impact on human life.”
