Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote speech on the Nvidia GTC conference on the SAP Center in San Jose, California, March 18, 2024.
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Last week, deals were announced with Johnson & Johnson to make use of generative artificial intelligence in surgery and with GE Healthcare to enhance medical imaging. Healthcare developments on the 2024 GTC AI conference – which also included the launch of roughly two dozen recent AI-powered and healthcare-focused tools – display how vital medicine is to Nvidia’s future non-tech revenue opportunities.
“The reason why Nvidia is so popular today is because it basically provided the plumbing and the technology for something that couldn’t be done before simply or if you had to do something like that you would probably need several times as much time, money and cost,” said Raj Joshi, technology analyst and senior vp at Moody’s Ratings. “Health care, whether it’s biotechnology, chemicals or drug discovery, is a very powerful area.”
Nvidia’s shares have increased by almost 100% for the reason that starting of the yr, and the biotechnology industry is an example of untapped potential that investors proceed to bet on. Artificial intelligence can speed up the drug discovery process and even find applications for drugs that will have failed for the initial disease for which they were developed.
“Over the last 18 months, we have been led to believe that this is more hope than hype due to tangible results and then very compelling use cases for AI that have helped the pharmaceutical, medical and biotechnology industries,” said Arda Ural, EY Americas, market leader in the health and life sciences industry.
Drug development is a dangerous process that may take a minimum of a decade from concept to clinical trials, Ural said. It can also be a process that may cost billions and has a high risk of failure.
About 41 percent of biotech CEOs surveyed by EY in late 2023 said they were considering “specific” ways to make use of generative AI in their firms. “That’s a lot for my experience because I’ve been in this industry for 30 years,” Ural said. “This is a really unique feature that we are seeing with AI that is being adopted much faster than other technologies.”
At the conference, Nvidia focused on healthcare and doubled down on ambitions it has long had. During its February earnings call with investors, Nvidia mentioned several ways it’s adapting its technology for medical applications. Companies like i Generate: Biomedicines are expanding their biomedical research with the assistance of cloud providers specializing in hyperscale or GPUs, and they need Nvidia AI infrastructure to facilitate this process.
“In healthcare, digital biology and generative artificial intelligence are helping to reinvent medicines, surgery, medical imaging and wearables,” said Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer. “Over the past decade, we have built deep expertise in healthcare, building the NVIDIA Clara platform for healthcare and NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI service for developing, adapting and deploying foundational AI models for computer-aided drug discovery.”
Last yr, NVIDIA invested $50 million in Recursion as a part of its drug discovery projects. Recursion brings its biological and chemical data to coach NVIDIA’s AI models on its cloud platform. The company also collaborated with Roche’s Genetech to develop recent drugs and higher treatment protocols. In 2021, she also collaborated with Schrödinger for locating a cure.
One of NVIDIA’s biggest benefits in healthcare up to now is its BioNeMo platform, an AI-powered generative cloud service built specifically for drug discovery.
“It’s one thing to design semiconductors and computing platforms for others to do. But it’s a totally different thing to construct full-fledged technology stacks that may be sold to the client,” Joshi said. “Let’s say you’re a biotech company, you take the full technology from Nvidia and you just start working on it, rather than figuring out how to leverage that information technology?”
Biotechnology-focused generative AI platforms have the ability to lower costs for pharmaceutical companies beyond the drug development process. Many companies have moved their back-office processes across supply chain, finance and administrative functions, as well as manufacturing to save money. However, as geopolitical tensions increase and pressure to bring jobs back to the United States, moving jobs overseas is becoming an increasing cost.
“Now you can do it at home with AI at a much lower cost because you now have AI-based robotic process automation,” Ural said. “So not only does it help speed up drug development, it also helps lower the cost of running the business. This means you can allocate more capital to drug development and find more drugs faster.”
The healthcare space is an example of how far a company that designed gaming graphics cards a decade ago has come. “To their credit, Jensen showed some foresight back in 2012 when, at Stanford University, he noticed that some people were actually using his graphics card to solve some math problems,” Joshi said. “He said, ‘You know what, this might actually be used for so-called general computing, you understand, things that all of us do every single day, under normal circumstances.'”
But to fully realize the benefits of artificial intelligence that are only becoming clear in the health care sector, leaders will need greater support from one of the nation’s largest workforces. According to the EY AI Anxiety in Business study, more than two-thirds of health sciences and wellness workers have concerns about the use of AI, and 7 in 10 are concerned about the adoption of AI in the workplace.
