“This year, every industry will become a technology industry,” NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told delegates Wednesday during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
In a fireside chat with Martin Chavez, partner and vice chairman of global investment firm Sixth Street Partners and board chair of biopharmaceutical company Recursion, Huang stated, “You can now recognize and learn the language of almost anything with structure, and you can translate it to anything with structure — so text-protein, protein-text.” “The revolution in generative AI is here.”
The discussion, which took place in the iconic San Francisco Mint, came after NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare, Kimberly Powell, gave a presentation on Monday at the J.P. Morgan conference. Recursion is the first hosting partner to provide a foundation model via the NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud service, Powell said in her address. The service is moving into beta this month.
She also claimed that Amgen, one of the first organizations to adopt BioNeMo, wants to accelerate drug development with generative AI and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD — and that BioNeMo is employed by an increasing number of techbio companies, pharmas, AI software suppliers and systems integrators. Deloitte, Innophore, OneAngstrom, Insilico Medicine, Recursion, and Terray Therapeutics are a few of them.
From Computer-Aided Chip Design to Drug Design Healthcare customers and partners now consume well over a billion dollars in NVIDIA GPU computing each year — directly and indirectly through cloud partners.
Huang linked two research projects that he became interested in about 15 years ago—one at Mass General used NVIDIA GPUs to reconstruct CT images, and the other at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign used GPU acceleration to study molecular dynamics—as the reason behind NVIDIA’s involvement in accelerated healthcare.
He realized that, “if we scale this up by a billion times, we could simulate biology,” and remarked, “It opened my mind that we could apply the same methodology that we use in computer-aided chip design to help the world of drug discovery go from computer-aided drug discovery to computer-aided drug design.”
Huang clarified that engineers may now construct complicated computing systems entirely in simulation following forty years of progress in computer-aided semiconductor design. The same may be true for AI-accelerated drug design during the course of the next ten years.
He used the phrase “virtually everything will start in silico, largely end in silico,” which describes an experiment carried out on a computer.
Working Together to Shape the Future of Medical Devices and Drug Discovery
Computer-aided drug development is “genuinely miraculous,” according to Huang, given the advancements made thus far.
By developing cutting-edge AI models and robust computing platforms, working with subject matter experts, and investing in techbio startups, NVIDIA is advancing the area.
Huang remarked, “We are determined to work with you to advance this field,” and extended an invitation to NVIDIA’s healthcare innovators to get in touch. “We firmly think that this will be the approach taken in the future to find and create drugs.”
Algorithms for cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, gene sequencing, amino acid structure prediction, and virtual drug molecule screening are among the processes the company uses to enhance healthcare. Furthermore, these computational tools are getting much easier to obtain as AI develops, according to Huang.
“We have closed the technology divide in a dramatic way because of artificial intelligence and the groundbreaking work that our industry has done,” he declared. “Everyone is a programmer, and ‘human’ is the programming language of the future.”
Beyond the creation of drugs, medical tools will evolve as a result of this industry transition to one that is software-defined and AI-driven.
“A medical device will never be the same once more. Systems like CT scans, ultrasounds, and various tools will always consist of a gadget and numerous AIs, according to Huang. “The opportunities and value that you generate will be extraordinary.”
