On Monday, AI development powerhouse Nvidia kicked off this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco by announcing new partnerships focused on scaling AI models across healthcare.
One of Nvidia’s new partnerships is with Mayo Clinic — the collaboration seeks to accelerate the development of pathology foundation models.
Mayo Clinic’s digital pathology platform houses 20 million whole-slide images, as well as 10 million associated patient records. To quicken the pace of foundation model development on this platform, the health system will deploy Nvidia’s DGX Blackwell AI systems, as well as Monai, the company’s healthcare imaging platform.
“Our ultimate goal is to create a human digital twin. This is a dynamic digital representation, including medical imaging, pathology, health records and wearables. To achieve this, Mayo Clinic and Nvidia will leverage some of the latest AI models and vision language models like Cosmos Nemotron and our microservices, and this collaboration will be a cornerstone for new applications in drug discovery and diagnostic medicine,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president and general manager of healthcare at Nvidia, during a press briefing.
Another one of Nvidia’s partnerships is with IQVIA, a life sciences analytics and clinical research firm.
The firm will leverage Nvidia’s AI foundry service to create foundation models — with the ultimate goal of deploying AI agents to IQVIA’s more than 10,000 customers across healthcare and life sciences, Powell noted.
“IQVIA has a really rich and unique dataset of 64 petabytes of proprietary data that’s representing over a billion unique and anonymized patients from 100 different countries,” she pointed out.
Nvidia’s AI foundry service includes models, software and expert services to help organizations create and deploy AI tools. By using Nvidia’s AI foundry, IQVIA will be able to develop AI agents more quickly, Powell remarked.
She highlighted AI agents — which are AI models that complete specific tasks without human intervention — as an important area taking off within the greater AI field.
“Agent AI cannot only perceive, but it can reason, plan and even take action,” Powell declared.
On the biopharma side of things, Nvidia is teaming up with DNA sequencing powerhouse Illumina.
Illumina will use Nvidia’s computing and AI toolsets to augment its multiomics analysis technology — which analyzes data from the genome, transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, metabolome microbiome to advance drug discovery and precision medicine.
This will enable Illumina to create foundation models that will “unlock the next generation of genomics insights,” Powell remarked.
“We’re going to unlock new markets for genomics by making genomics insights — not just the data, but the insights — much more accessible and impactful, driving significant advancements in disease research and drug discovery,” she stated.
The final partnership Nvidia announced on Monday was also in the biopharma space. The company is collaborating with Arc Institute, a research organization focusing on biology and machine learning, to develop AI tools to advance biomedical discovery.
Arc’s researchers are working with Nvidia’s engineers to build and scale foundation models that can be generalized across various modalities within biology, such as DNA, RNA and proteins.
“Our partnership is going to focus on developing true foundation models for biology using Nvidia BioNeMo and DGX Cloud. All of our resulting work is going to be shared and contributed back to the open source in BioNeMo so we can truly democratize large scale biomedical research,” Powell declared.
She said Nvidia hopes to be “actively announcing the outputs” of these collaborations throughout the rest of the year.
Credit: MR.Cole_Photographer, Getty Images
