Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a keynote speech during the Nvidia GTC conference at the SAP Center in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
last week, Nvidia It announced deals with Johnson & Johnson to use generative AI in surgery, and with GE Healthcare to improve medical imaging. The healthcare developments at the 2024 GTC AI Conference, which also included the launch of nearly two dozen new healthcare-focused AI-powered tools, show how important medicine will be to Nvidia's non-technology sector revenue opportunities going forward.
“The reason Nvidia is so popular today is because they basically provided the plumbing and technology for something you simply couldn't do before or if you had to do something like this, you would probably need many times more time, money and cost,” said Raj Joshi, technology analyst and senior vice president. To the head of Moody's Ratings: “Healthcare, whether it's biotechnology, chemicals or drug discovery, is a very strong field.”
Nvidia shares are up nearly 100% year to date, and the biotech industry is an example of the untapped potential that investors continue to bet on. AI can speed up the drug discovery process and even find uses for drugs that may have failed to produce results for the initial disease they were developed to target.
“Over the last 18 months or so, we tend to think it's more of a hope than a hype because of the tangible results and then the very compelling use cases that AI has helped in the pharmaceutical industry or the medtech industry or the technology industry,” Arda Ural said. Vitality. EY is the health and life sciences industry market leader in the Americas.
Oral said drug development is a risky process and can take at least a decade from concept to clinical studies. It's also a process that can cost billions, with a high probability of failure.
About 41 percent of biotech CEOs surveyed by EY in late 2023 said they were looking for “tangible” ways generative AI could be used in their companies. “That's pretty high for my experience, after 30 years in this industry,” Ural said. “It's a really unique feature that we're seeing with AI that is being picked up much faster than other technologies.”
Nvidia's focus on healthcare at its conference was doubling down on an ambition it had long held. During an earnings call with investors in February, Nvidia mentioned several ways to adapt its technology to the medical field. Companies like Oudian Pharmaceuticals And generation: Biomedical companies are scaling their biomedical research with the help of specialized large-scale cloud or GPU providers, and they need Nvidia AI infrastructure to facilitate the process.
“In healthcare, digital biology and generative AI are helping to reinvent drug discovery, surgery, medical imaging and wearables,” said Colette Kress, Nvidia's CFO. “We have built deep healthcare expertise over the past decade, creating the NVIDIA Clara healthcare platform and NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI service to develop, customize, and deploy core AI models for computer-aided drug discovery.”
Last year, NVIDIA invested $50 million in Recursion for drug discovery projects. Recursion feeds its biological and chemical data to train NVIDIA's AI models on its cloud platform. The company also worked with Roche subsidiary Genentech to develop new medicines and better treatment protocols. It also entered into a partnership in 2021 with Schrödinger for drug discovery.
One of NVIDIA's greatest strengths in healthcare to date is the BioNeMo platform, an AI-generating cloud service designed specifically for drug development.
“It's one thing to design semiconductors and computing platforms for others to do something. But it's a completely different thing when you can build entire packages of technology that you can sell to a customer,” Joshi said. “Let's say you're a biotech company, and you take the whole technology from Nvidia, and you start working on it instead of figuring out, 'How can I use this IT?'
Biotechnology-focused generative AI platforms have the potential to reduce costs for pharmaceutical companies beyond the drug development process. Many companies have offshored their back-office operations for supply chain, financial and administrative functions, as well as manufacturing, to save money. But as geopolitical tensions rise and emphasis is placed on bringing jobs back to the United States, offshoring has become an increasing cost.
“Now you can do it at home using AI and at a much lower cost because you now have robotic process automation, powered by AI,” Ural said. “So, not only does it help speed up drug development, but it also helps lower the cost of running a company. This means you can allocate more capital toward drug development and find more treatments faster.”
The healthcare space is an example of how far a company that was designing gaming graphics cards a decade ago has come. “You have to give them credit that Jensen had the foresight back in 2012 when he saw some people actually using his graphics card at Stanford to solve some types of mathematical problems,” Joshi said. “And he said, 'You know, this can actually be used to do what's called general computing, you know, things that we all do every day on a regular basis.'”
But to fully realize the benefits of AI that are just becoming evident in the healthcare sector, leaders will need to get more support from one of the country's largest workforces. According to the EY Business Concern Survey, more than two-thirds of health sciences and wellness employees have concerns about using AI, and 7 in 10 are concerned about adopting AI in the workplace.
