Nvidia took the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week as an occasion to announce partnerships that will bring more agentic AI technology into healthcare applications.
The timing of the announcement coincided with the Biden Administration proposal for new rules around the export of AI chips, a move that stirred negative reactions from Nvidia and its chip brethren. But, as the industry continues to review that proposal and its implications, the AI technology evolution also continues to mature with increasing real-world usage of AI, and healthcare is at the forefront of that movement.
According to Nvidia, the Mayo Clinic is planning to deploy DGX Blackwell systems to fuel its new digital pathology platform and help it move toward the goal of creating human digital twins, according to Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia.
Powell also said during a pre-conference briefing that clinical research organization IQVIA is leveraging the Nvidia AI Foundry service and related software. Meanwhile, biotech firm Illumina and non-profit research group the Arc Institute are both using Nvidia’s BioNeMo generative AI platform as part of their own separate collaborations with Nvidia. Those partnerships come about two years after Nvidia launched the BioNeMo platform, along with an initial campaign to bring generative AI into the healthcare sector.
“AI offers an exceptional opportunity to advance healthcare and life sciences with tools that help providers detect diseases earlier and discover new treatments faster,” said Kimberly Powell. “The combination of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing capabilities with the expertise of industry leaders is poised to usher in a new era of medical and biological innovation and improve patient outcomes worldwide.”
Those outcomes will be improved in part by enabling healthcare organizations to be more operationally efficient with the leveraging of their in-house data. In the case of the Mayo Clinic, the new DGX Blackwell systems will be used with Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology platform, which offers a dataset of 20 million whole-slide images with 10 million associated patient records, to create new pathology foundation models.
IQVIA, meanwhile, aims to develop agentic AI solutions that leverage Nvidia software and NIM microservices to accelerate research, clinical development and access to new treatments.
“This represents a significant leap forward in how we apply AI to healthcare and life sciences,” said Bhavik Patel, president of commercial solutions at IQVIA. “We are excited to combine our industry-leading capabilities and a decade of experience in artificial intelligence with Nvidia’s advanced AI technologies to build new solutions powered by AI agents that are trained on world-class healthcare information and optimized for life sciences workflows. This collaboration will advance our mission to help our clients accelerate innovation and treatments to market.”
Nvidia’s partnership with Illumina will see the companies collaborating on broadening access to analysis and insights on the human genome to help improve the use of genomics for drug discovery, among other goals. Specifically, Illumina will offer its DRAGEN (Dynamic Read Analysis for genomics) software on Nvidia accelerated computing within the Illumina Connected Analytics platform. The integration aims to expand DRAGEN accessibility globally to wherever Nvidia’s computing platform exists.
As for Arc Institute, the Palo Alto, California-based research organization is using BioNeMo as part of an effort to scale the potential of foundation models for biology that can generalize across different modalities, like DNA, RNA and proteins, and advance applications for drug discovery, synthetic biology across multiple scales of complexity, disease and evolution research, and more.