Every industry will become a technology industry – these are the predictions of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, as evidenced by a post written by author Rory Keller on the NVIDIA blog.

The news comes after Jenson Huang’s statement at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that “This year, every industry will become a technology industry.”

The talk, which took place in San Francisco, followed a J.P. Morgan conference presentation delivered by Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare. In her talk, Powell announced that Recursion is the first hosting partner to offer a foundation model through the NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud service, which goes into beta this month.

Drug Discovery with Generative AI and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD

Kimberly Powell also shared that Amgen plans to advance drug discovery with generative AI and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD – and that BioNeMo is being used by a growing number of technology companies, pharmaceutical companies, AI software providers and system integrators. These include Deloitte, Innophore, Insilico Medicine, OneAngstrom, Recursion and Terray Therapeutics.

From chip design to drug design

Healthcare customers and partners invest over a billion dollars in NVIDIA GPUs each year – directly and indirectly through cloud partners.

NVIDIA’s founder and CEO traced the company’s involvement in healthcare to two research projects that caught his attention some 15 years ago. One at Mass General used NVIDIA GPUs to reconstruct computed tomography images, and another at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign applied GPU acceleration to molecular dynamics.

“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,” he said, realizing that, “if we scale this up by a billion times, we could simulate biology.”

Jensen Huang further explains that after 40 years of advances in computer-aided chip design, engineers can now create complex computer systems entirely through simulation. In the next decade, the same may be true for AI-mediated drug discovery and design.

Collaborating on the Future of Drug Discovery and Medical Instruments
NVIDIA is propelling the field forward by building state-of-the-art AI models and powerful computing platforms, and by collaborating with domain experts and investing in techbio companies.

“We are determined to work with you to advance this field,” Huang said, inviting healthcare innovators to reach out to NVIDIA. “We deeply believe that this is going to be the future of the way that drugs will be discovered and designed.”

The company’s pipelines for accelerated healthcare include algorithms for cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, gene sequencing, amino acid structure prediction and virtual drug molecule screening. And as AI advances, these computing tools are becoming much easier to access, Huang said.

Because of artificial intelligence and the groundbreaking work that our industry has done, we have closed the technology divide in a dramatic way,” he said. “Everybody is a programmer, and the programming language of the future is called ‘human.’”

“A medical instrument is never going to be the same again. Ultrasound systems, CT scan systems, all kinds of instruments — they’re always going to be a device plus a whole bunch of AIs. The value that will create, the opportunities you create, are going to be incredible”, Huang said.

Beyond drug development, this transformation to a software-defined, AI-driven industry will also advance medical instruments.