NVIDIA and Novo Nordisk Partner to Advance AI in Drug Discovery

By Bio-IT World Staff
June 11, 2025

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the limitations of pre-trained generative AI models, such as hallucinations and lack of access to real-time data, during his presentation at NVIDIA GTC in Paris. However, he emphasized that these "one-shot" AI models were essential stepping stones to the development of agentic AI, which he described as a significant leap forward.

Key Announcement: NVIDIA and Novo Nordisk Partnership

NVIDIA announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk to accelerate drug discovery using customized AI models and agents. This partnership aims to leverage NVIDIA's advanced simulation and physical AI technologies to enhance early research, clinical development, and molecule design.

NVIDIA’s AI Platform for Drug Discovery

Novo Nordisk will utilize the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform to build specialized AI agents tailored to pharmaceutical development. According to Rory Kelleher, NVIDIA’s senior director of business development for life sciences, this platform will help Novo Nordisk "harness the full potential of generative and agentic AI."

The collaboration will focus on several AI-driven initiatives, including:

• Single-cell models to predict cellular responses to drug candidates.
• Molecule design to create compounds with drug-like properties.
• Biomedical large language models to analyze global scientific literature and uncover correlations between genes, proteins, and diseases.

Technological Infrastructure

The research will be conducted on Denmark’s flagship AI supercomputer, DCAI’s Gefion, powered by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Novo Nordisk will also employ:

• NVIDIA BioNeMo for generative AI in drug discovery.
• NVIDIA NIM and NVIDIA NeMo microservices for building agentic workflows.
• NVIDIA Omniverse for creating physically accurate simulation environments.

Industry Impact

Mishal Patel, Novo Nordisk’s senior vice president of AI and digital innovation, stated that combining NVIDIA’s computing expertise with Novo Nordisk’s R&D capabilities will enable faster and more efficient drug development. This partnership underscores the growing role of AI in transforming the pharmaceutical industry.

"You’re going to be hiring agents," Huang predicted, envisioning a future where companies rely on specialized AI agents for tasks ranging from market research to operations planning.

This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in the convergence of AI and life sciences, promising to unlock new possibilities in drug discovery and development.