NVIDIA and Lilly announce co-innovation AI lab to
reinvent
(SAN FRANCISCO) - J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference:
NVIDIA and
Eli Lilly and Company
have announced a
first-of-its-kind AI
co-innovation lab focused on
applying AI to tackle some
of the most enduring
challenges in the
pharmaceutical industry.
The lab brings together
Lilly’s world-leading
expertise in discovering,
developing, and
manufacturing medicines with
NVIDIA’s leadership in AI,
accelerated computing, and
AI infrastructure. The two
companies will invest up to
$1 billion in talent,
infrastructure, and compute
over five years to support
the new AI co-innovation
lab.
Based in the San
Francisco Bay Area, the lab
will co-locate Lilly domain
experts in biology, science
and medicine with top AI
model builders and engineers
from NVIDIA, allowing them
to work side by side to
generate large-scale data
and build powerful AI models
that can accelerate medicine
development, using NVIDIA
BioNeMo™ as the critical
platform.“AI is transforming
every industry, and its most
profound impact will be in
life sciences,” said
Jensen Huang, founder and
CEO of NVIDIA.
“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.”
“For nearly 150 years,
we’ve been working to bring
life-changing medicines to
patients,” said
David A. Ricks, chair and
CEO of Lilly.
“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. By
bringing together
world-class talent in a
startup environment, we’re
creating the conditions for
breakthroughs that neither
company could achieve
alone.”
Building a Continuous
Learning System for Drug
Discovery
The collaboration will
initially focus on creating
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.
This scientist-in-the-loop
framework aims to enable
experiments, data
generation, and AI model
development to continuously
inform and improve one
another.
Harnessing
access to unprecedented
compute for the industry,
massive, high-quality data
generation, and NVIDIA
BioNeMo as the platform to
accelerate drug discovery,
the teams will focus on
building next-generation
foundation and frontier
models for biology and
chemistry.
The new
initiative expands on
Lilly’s previously announced
AI supercomputer and intends
to harness investments in
next-generation NVIDIA
architectures, including
NVIDIA Vera Rubin. The AI
factory Lilly announced last
fall, which is the most
powerful in the
pharmaceutical industry,
will train large biomedical
foundation and frontier
models for identifying,
optimizing, and validating
new molecules with
exceptional speed and
accuracy. It will also
support new and advanced
applications in
manufacturing, medical
imaging, and scientific AI
agents.
Beyond drug
discovery, NVIDIA and Lilly
will explore opportunities
to apply AI across clinical
development, manufacturing,
and commercial operations to
integrate multimodal models,
agentic AI, robotics, and
digital twins. The use of
physical AI and robotics in
the AI factory will also
help Lilly enhance its
capacity to manufacture
high-demand medications and
strengthen supply chain
reliability.
With
NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries
and NVIDIA RTX PRO™ Servers,
Lilly can create digital
twins of its manufacturing
lines to model, stress test,
and optimize entire supply
chains before making
physical changes in the real
world. Supporting Global
Leadership in Biomedical
Discovery NVIDIA leads in
open-source AI, empowering
companies with the models,
data, and tools needed to
develop real-world AI
systems. In addition, the
NVIDIA Inception program
provides startups with
access to technical
mentorship, as well as
NVIDIA software and compute.
Lilly TuneLab, an AI and
machine learning platform,
provides biotech companies
with access to select Lilly
models for drug discovery
built on decades of Lilly’s
proprietary data. TuneLab
will include NVIDIA Clara™
open foundation models for
life sciences as part of a
future workflow offering.
The co-innovation lab will
provide NVIDIA and Lilly’s
startup ecosystems and
researchers with deep
expertise and scale of
computing resources.
The lab’s work is expected
to begin in South San
Francisco early this year.
