Recursion and NVIDIA partner for AI-enabled drug discovery developments

Betsy Goodfellow | July 13, 2023 | News story | Research and Development |  AI, Pharmacy, Recursion, drug discovery 

Clinical stage biotech company Recursion has announced a $50m investment by NVIDIA, intended to accelerate the development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, working in collaboration with NVIDIA to optimise and distribute these AI models to biotechnology companies through NVIDIA’s cloud services.

Recursion intends to use its biological and chemical dataset to accelerate the training of foundation models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud for commercial license/release on BioNeMo (NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery). NVIDIA is also expected to help optimise and scale the foundation models using its AI and computing expertise.

Chris Gibson, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, commented: “Our collaboration with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery. With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space.”

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, added: “Generative AI is a revolutionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments. We are delighted to collaborate with Recursion’s world-class team, which is doing pioneering work in digital biology and chemistry with NVIDIA DGX and NVIDIA AI software to accelerate the development of the world’s largest biomolecular generative AI models and speed drug discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.”

Betsy Goodfellow