NVIDIA partners with GSK’s AI-powered lab for discovery of medicines and vaccines

NVIDIA announced a partnership with global healthcare company GSK and its AI group, which is applying computation to the drug and vaccine discovery process.

GSK has recently established a new London-based AI hub, one of the first of its kind, which will leverage GSK’s significant genetic and genomic data to improve the process of designing and developing transformational medicines and vaccines.

Located in London’s rapidly growing Knowledge Quarter, GSK’s hub will utilise biomedical data, AI methods and advanced computing platforms to unlock genetic and clinical data with increased precision and scale. The GSK AI hub, once fully operational, will be home to its UK-based AI team, including GSK AI Fellows, a new professional training programme and now scientists from NVIDIA.

“Because of the massive size of the datasets we use for drug discovery, we need to push the boundaries of hardware and develop new machine learning software,” said Dr Kim Branson, senior vice president and global head of AI and ML, GSK. “We’re building new algorithms and approaches in addition to bringing together the best minds at the intersection of medicine, genetics and artificial intelligence in the UK’s rich ecosystem. This new partnership with NVIDIA will also contribute additional computational power and state-of-the-art AI technology.”

NVIDIA will contribute its deep expertise in GPU optimisation and high-performance computational pipeline development, including NVIDIA Clara Discovery, a new collection of optimised computational drug discovery applications and frameworks. In addition to its investment in NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, GSK will also have access to NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1, the United Kingdom’s most powerful AI supercomputer.

“GSK and NVIDIA together will help push the boundaries of what AI can do and put vast data sources to work to advance the discovery of new medicines and vaccines,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “GSK is leading the industry in defining the next generation of data-driven drug discovery by harnessing genetic and clinical data to bring more precision to research and medicine.”