Nvidia forges healthcare partnerships to advance AI-driven genomics, drug discovery and more

Healthcare has the most significant upside, particularly in patient care, among all the industries applicable to AI. The healthcare industry creates massive amounts of data, but much of it lives in silos. Also, because of the specialization of healthcare services, connecting the dots between the data points is nearly impossible.

I recently talked with a doctor at Stanford Healthcare about this, and he believes AI will play a significant role in diagnosing uncommon issues. He explained that a cardiac doctor would often run tests to see if something is heart related, and then a GI doctor might run a similar test to investigate stomach concerns. He then further elaborated that there is no mechanism to connect the dots between the tests that the various doctors run, but he’s hopeful AI will play that role.

AI can improve every aspect of healthcare and life sciences. AI can analyze data to diagnose diseases earlier and discover new treatments faster. For example, I recently talked to a data scientist at a Northeast hospital where Nvidia DGX’s are used to analyze MRIs. Before AI, doctors would spend a significant amount of time, up to 80%, studying MRIs and only about 20% of their time treating patients. With AI, that number has flipped, and doctors can now spend most of their time treating patients as if the AI were looking at MRIs. The other benefit is AI can “see” things a human doctor can’t. The use of AI can spot the most abnormalities in an MRI.

Given the number of specialty companies in the industry, solving healthcare challenges with AI requires an ecosystem approach. At the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Nvidia announced several new AI-centric partnerships with industry leaders to advance genomics, drug discovery, and advanced healthcare services.

In an analyst briefing, Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia, described the “AI revolution” in healthcare, enabling new product creation. “Instead of humans writing code, you now have LLMs (large language models). You introduce data, and the machine learns from that data. It builds models and then writes software that executes on a GPU. We call that the AI factory.”

Nvidia has been evangelizing the concept of the AI factory over the past several months. It was prominent in CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at CES and at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference during a panel with Azita Martin, vice president and general manager of retail and CPG. The idea behind the AI factory is to shift computing to meet AI’s data-heavy demands. Powell explained how, with AI, data is the raw material, and tokens are the commodity, with the tokens being generated in the factory.

Through its Inception program, Nvidia already has more than a thousand digital healthcare startups in its industry ecosystem. Those startups are developing thousands of AI agents using Nvidia AI Enterprise, which provides creators with the necessary building blocks—from pre-trained models to state-of-the-art retrieval, augmented generation, and guardrails for agentic AI.

 Here are the highlights of Nvidia’s latest healthcare partnerships announced at the event.

• IQVIA, a Durham, N.C.-based global provider of clinical research services, commercial insights, and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare industries, is leveraging Nvidia’s AI foundry and factory to accelerate the development and deployment of AI agents for its more than 10,000 healthcare customers. The partnership will accelerate trial execution while reducing administrative burdens by deploying AI agents to transform complex workflows and turn IQVIA’s database into a knowledge base.
• Nvidia is collaborating with Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Palo Alto dedicated to accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root cause of disease. The partnership will focus on “developing true foundation models for biology using Nvidia BioNeMo frameworks and Nvidia DGX Cloud. The resulting work will be shared and contributed to the open-source community in BioNeMo, democratizing large-scale biomedical research.
• A partnership with Illumina will combine Illumina’s next-generation sequencing technologies and connected analytics platform with Nvidia’s Clara AI healthcare suite to develop and deploy foundation models that unlock genomics insights, expanding the opportunities in that field. Illumina will integrate Nvidia’s computing libraries, several APIs, and other capabilities to target new markets for genomics through insights—not just the data.
• Collaboration with Mayo Clinic is designed to accelerate the development of next-generation pathology foundation models to push the frontiers in mental health experiences and predictive and efficient treatment strategies. The Mayo Clinic will deploy the Nvidia’s DGX B200 platform featuring 1.4 terabytes of GPU memory. This type of system is ideal for handling large digital healthcare and digital pathology whole slide images. These systems will integrate Nvidia’s Project MONAI AI toolkit of open-source frameworks with Mayo Clinic’s digital platform. Powell said the goal is to “create a human digital twin. Just a dynamic digital representation, including medical imaging, pathology, health records, and wearables.” Using a digital twin can enable doctors to run “what if scenarios” for treatment to better understand outcomes and risks.

Nvidia’s focus on industries will help accelerate adoption as it shows the art of the possible. In January, the company rolled out Nvidia AI Blueprint for retail shopping assistants at the NRF show. When I stopped by the Nvidia station in the Dell booth, there was a constant stream of major brands looking to learn how to use AI in their environments.

These partnerships in healthcare announcements will have a similar impact in that industry, as Nvidia, with its ecosystem partners, can showcase practical use cases. Healthcare is often regarded as slow-moving and lacking in innovation, and AI can help change that.