Swiss pharma Roche is staying in lockstep with Eli Lilly, expanding its AI offerings and Nvidia partnership shortly after the latter drugmaker unveiled an Nvidia supercomputer.
Roche’s “hybrid-cloud AI factory” is designed to accelerate development for new therapeutics and diagnostics, according to a March 16 release shared after market close.
The new pact furnishes Roche with 2,176 Nvidia Blackwell Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), bringing Roche’s total to 3,500 GPUs and making the pharma the largest known hybrid-cloud AI factory in the industry, according to the release.
Nvidia’s high-performance GPUs will be located at Roche sites across the U.S. and Europe. Roche's use of the term AI factory refers to a supercomputing platform that the pharma hopes will drive digital transformation across its business.
For research and development work, Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform will complement Roche unit Genentech's “Lab-in-the-Loop” strategy, which involves bringing generative AI to drug discovery and development. The company also plans on using other Nvidia tech for manufacturing, diagnostics, digital pathology and digital health efforts.
The incorporation of Nvidia’s AI tech and accelerated computing is designed to speed up discovery work and conduct more efficient clinical trials, while also falling in line with Roche’s mission of “building an AI-accelerated healthcare organization.”
The AI deal builds on a 2023 research collab between Genentech and Nvidia in which the two aimed to accelerate the drug discovery and development process.
It also follows the unveiling of rival Lilly’s supercomputer, which was created with Nvidia.
“We’re trying to escape the traditional pharma industry life cycle,” Diogo Rau, Lilly’s chief information and digital officer, told Fierce a few weeks ago. “This industry is so bizarre compared to other industries, with these huge peaks and these really deep troughs that span decades.”
The two pharmas have been in somewhat of a strange investment back-and-forth, with Lilly announcing a $500 million investment in the South Korea biopharma scene less than a week after Roche formed a similar $484 million pact with the country.
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