Leading Global Pharma Joins Danish Enterprises, Startups and Public Health Systems Using AI Factories to Improve Drug Discovery and Healthcare
NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Novo Nordisk to accelerate drug discovery efforts through innovative AI use cases. The work supports Novo Nordisk’s agreement with DCAI to use the Gefion sovereign AI supercomputer.
The companies aim to create customized AI models and agents that Novo Nordisk can use for early research and clinical development and to apply advanced simulation and physical AI technologies.
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“AI is essential for every industry, and there’s no other field that will benefit more from acceleration than drug discovery,” said Rory Kelleher, senior director of business development for life sciences at NVIDIA. “Working with Novo Nordisk, we’re advancing critical R&D applications with fundamental tools that can harness the full potential of generative and agentic AI to improve pharmaceutical development.”
Novo Nordisk Taps Advanced AI to Accelerate Innovation
DCAI’s Gefion supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, provides Novo Nordisk an AI factory for running drug discovery and agentic AI workloads. Novo Nordisk will use NVIDIA BioNeMo for generative AI-powered drug discovery, NVIDIA NIM and NVIDIA NeMo microservices for building customized agentic workflows, and the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform to create physically accurate simulation environments for developing physical AI applications.
Novo Nordisk researchers will focus on several AI research programs, including using single-cell models to predict cellular responses to drug candidates and structures, as well as designing models to build molecules with drug-like properties. The companies will also collaborate on tapping Novo Nordisk’s vast global scientific literature to build biomedical large language models, enabling researchers to uncover correlations between genes, proteins and diseases.
“By coupling NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform and expertise with Novo’s deep expertise in life sciences research and development, we aim to build custom models that will aid our scientists in developing new medicines faster and more efficiently,” said Mishal Patel, senior vice president, AI and digital innovation at Novo Nordisk. “Gefion will allow us to run experiments at an unprecedented scale.”
Advancing Denmark’s Healthcare Ecosystem
DCAI owns and operates Gefion, Denmark’s flagship AI supercomputer. DCAI is helping lower the barrier for accessing advanced computing capabilities and enabling companies in Denmark to pursue research and development across healthcare and drug discovery.
“With Gefion’s computational power, we can tackle the toughest R&D challenges, with the ultimate goal of unlocking new possibilities for pharmaceutical research and development,” said Nadia Carlsten, CEO of DCAI. “By combining Gefion’s capabilities with NVIDIA’s expertise, our customers can accelerate innovation even further.”
Gefion has already been used by multiple customers to advance healthcare and drug discovery.
Teton, a Danish startup and member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups, is tapping into Gefion to accelerate the development of its AI care companion for hospitals, using cameras and sensors installed in patient rooms to create real-time 3D digital twins. This allows nurses to monitor patients remotely and receive alerts about potential health issues. Teton’s technology aims to reduce workload burden on nurses — freeing them up for higher-value tasks — and improve patient care, with early trials showing up to a 25% reduction in nightshift duties.
Last month, DCAI announced that one of the first pharma companies to use Gefion will tap the supercomputer to accelerate drug discovery and development in neurological and psychiatric disorders. Another venture-backed company is using Gefion to accelerate the development of oral alternatives to widely used biologics and to target proteins that are currently difficult or impossible to drug with available compounds.
Gefion will also be used as part of an effort by Danish health organizations to unite previously siloed health data into a single national analysis platform, which will provide researchers with secure access to interconnected health data. Along with supercomputing resources, this will make it easier to analyze large datasets, identify disease patterns earlier and develop more personalized treatments.
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Source – GlobeNewswire
