NVIDIA and Lilly Announce Co-Innovation Lab for Drug Discovery in the Age of AI

The co-innovation Lab of NVIDIA and Lilly brings a world-leading, multidisciplinary team of scientists, AI researchers and engineers to address the hardest problems in drug discovery.

To tackle some of the most long-term challenges in the pharmaceutical industry, NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company have announced a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab focused on applying AI.

The lab combines NVIDIA's strength in AI, accelerated computing, and AI infrastructure with Lilly's world-class experience in drug discovery, development, and manufacturing. To support the new AI co-innovation center, the two businesses will invest up to $1 billion over the course of five years on people, infrastructure, and computing.

The collaboration will primarily focus on creating a continuous learning system that strongly connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This scientist-in-the-loop framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to educate and improve each other. In order to incorporate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics, and digital twins, NVIDIA and Lilly will investigate ways to utilize AI beyond drug discovery in clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations.

According to the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, AI is transforming every industry, and it will have the most profound impact in life sciences. And that, NVIDIA and Lilly are bringing together the best of their industries to invent a new blueprint for drug discovery, one where scientists can explore vast biological and chemical spaces in silico before a single molecule is made.

David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly said that, they’ve been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients for nearly 150 years. He also said that combining their volumes of data and scientific knowledge with NVIDIA’s computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as they know it and by bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, they are creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone.

The teams will concentrate on developing next-generation foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry by utilizing access to unmatched compute for the industry, enormous, high-quality data creation, and NVIDIA BioNeMo as the platform to speed drug development.