Eli Lilly partners with Nvidia on an AI co-innovation lab
Eli Lilly (LLY) said on Monday that it is partnering with Nvidia (NVDA) to build an AI co-innovation lab that will use artificial intelligence to "tackle some of the most enduring challenges in the pharmaceutical industry."
Both companies will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in talent, infrastructure and compute to support the AI lab.
According to a press release announcing the new lab, the collaboration will first focus on creating a continuous learning system that "tightly connects" Lilly's agentic wet labs with its computational dry labs in order to enable 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation that supports biologists and chemists.
An AI agentic wet lab is one in which AI agents autonomously design, plan, execute, and analyze experiments with minimal human intervention. A computational dry lab is a research facility that is focused on data analysis, mathematical modeling and computer simulations, rather than physical experiments.
The lab, which will be based in San Francisco, will employ Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine and AI model builders and engineers from Nvidia. Work is set to begin early this year.
“For nearly 150 years, we’ve been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients,” David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly, said in a statement. “Combining our volume of data and scientific knowledge with Nvidia's computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it."
He added that by combining "world-class talent in a startup environment," Lilly and Nvidia are "creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone."
The company said that it will have access to “unprecedented compute for the industry," along with substantial high-quality data. The drug discovery efforts will be carried out on Nvidia's BioNeMo Framework, which is an open-source machine learning framework for the biopharma industry.
“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “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.”
Lilly last year launched an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) platform called Lilly Tunelab that gives biotech companies access to drug discovery models that have been trained on years of Lilly’s research.
The company said at the time that the first set of AI models includes proprietary data obtained through over $1 billion in investment research, which it called “one of the industry's most valuable datasets used to train an AI system available to biotechnology companies.”
The lab will include NVIDIA Clara open foundation models for life sciences as part of a future workflow offering, the company said.
Lilly in October also announced an AI supercomputer, which was built with 1,016 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs, that is being used to compress drug discovery timelines and enable accelerated breakthroughs in genomics, personalized medicine and molecular design at industrial scale.