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During the JPM Healthcare Conference, pharma giant Eli Lilly and Co. and NVIDIA announced a partnership to develop a San Francisco-based AI co-innovation lab, including an investment of up to $1 billion in infrastructure, workforce and compute power over five years.
The lab, which will be located in South San Francisco and begin work early this year, will house Lilly biologists, scientists and experts in medicine alongside AI model builders and engineers from NVIDIA, who will work together to accelerate drug development using NVIDIA's BioNeMo platform.
The partners aim to address challenges in the pharmaceutical industry by combining Lilly's expertise in discovering, developing and manufacturing drugs with NVIDIA's AI and computing infrastructure.
Initially, the companies will create a continuous learning system that connects Lilly's agentic wet labs with computational dry labs to allow for 24/7 AI-enabled experimentation in biology and chemistry. The companies say the framework will enable experiments, AI model development and data generation that will continuously inform and improve one another.
The partners also stated they will explore other opportunities to apply AI beyond drug discovery, including across clinical development, commercial operations and manufacturing.
"AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, 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."
THE LARGER TREND
NVIDIA also announced this week a collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific to combine Thermo Fisher's expertise in research equipment and experimental manufacturing with NVIDIA's AI offerings to reduce repetitive manual tasks in experimental design, equipment operation and result interpretation in data generation.
Last year, Eli Lilly and Co. and NVIDIA announced a collaboration to build a supercomputer to manage data ingestion, training, fine-tuning and high-volume inference to enhance drug discovery.
Lilly said the supercomputer will power an AI factory, allowing scientists to identify, optimize and validate new molecules, as well as train AI models on millions of experiments to test potential medicines. The companies said the supercomputer will also help with the manufacturing process.
Following the announcement, NVIDIA became the world's first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation after the AI giant's stock shot up more than 5% to around $211.98 per share. The company hit a $4 trillion valuation in July. Its stock is currently trading at approximately $187.83 per share.
