The Genentech division of The Roche Group is at the forefront of leveraging conceptual AI for the discovery, development, and improved treatment of new therapeutics.
A groundbreaking collaboration between Genentech and NVIDIA, a renowned biotech innovator, is set to revolutionize the landscape of drug discovery and development. By pooling the expertise of researchers from both entities, this partnership aims to enhance and expedite the utilization of Genentech’s proprietary systems.
Utilizing the advanced capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX Cloud, which provides specialized AI computation instances through a network of cloud service providers, NVIDIA will join forces with Genentech to advance these models further.
Genentech is poised to leverage NVIDIA BioNeMo, a tool that empowers biotech companies to enhance model customization and integrate cloud software programming interfaces into the realm of mathematical drug discovery processes.
BioNeMo, a domain-specific system previously available as a coaching service, streamlines, accelerates, and scales conceptual AI applications for drug discovery computations. By enabling scientists to pretrain or refine cutting-edge designs on the DGX Cloud platform, it facilitates the exploration of intricate biomolecular patterns and relationships.
The primary objective of this collaboration is to enhance Genentech’s “lab in a ring” framework for AI-driven drug discovery models. The overarching goal is to empower scientists to deliver iterative benefits to patients and the broader healthcare ecosystem by comprehending complex biomolecular patterns and relationships, thereby revolutionizing drug development and enhancing the success rate of research and development efforts.
Aviv Regev, the Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research & Early Development (gRED), emphasized that the partnership with NVIDIA builds upon their legacy of pioneering the inventive use of systems that have had immediate real-world impact. Genentech’s legacy includes being the first biotechnology company to utilize chemical science for drug discovery, leading to groundbreaking advancements in healthcare. By harnessing AI in collaboration with NVIDIA, Genentech aims to expedite the discovery and design of therapies that will positively impact patients worldwide through the introduction of relational AI.
Optimizing Computational Drug Discovery
The process of drug discovery and development is inherently protracted, complex, and costly. Predicting drug targets for novel medications and developing therapeutic proteins pose significant challenges. However, the integration of relational and diverse AI models can facilitate the rapid identification of potential drug molecules and interactions by leveraging extensive datasets, thereby playing a transformative role in the field.
For Genentech, AI serves as a crucial bridge between mathematical algorithms and practical laboratory experiments, streamlining the research and development process.
The gRED division of Genentech has already made substantial strides in leveraging AI across various modalities to discover and develop novel therapeutics while deepening the understanding of scientific principles and disease mechanisms.
To expedite the drug discovery process and enhance success rates, collaborative efforts between Genentech and NVIDIA will focus on refining the company’s bespoke models.
Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Innovation
Genentech’s “lab in a ring” represents an iterative framework for creating and analyzing chemical structures with predicted properties. By integrating experimental data to inform relational computational models for future chemical designs, Genentech aims to enhance its foundational capabilities with the support of NVIDIA. This collaboration is expected to accelerate the training and inference processes for drug discovery models.
Through this partnership, NVIDIA AI researchers stand to gain valuable insights into the challenges related to AI in drug discovery and development. NVIDIA intends to leverage these insights to enhance its BioNeMo application and other tools to better cater to the evolving needs of the biotech industry.
Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA, highlighted the transformative potential of AI in revolutionizing drug discovery and development, akin to its impact in other domains of healthcare and life sciences. By developing and deploying AI models and techniques that expedite insights generation, NVIDIA and Genentech are collectively driving clinical innovation forward.
