NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Novo Nordisk to accelerate drug discovery efforts through innovative AI use cases. The work supports Novo Nordisk’s agreement with DCAI to use the Gefion sovereign AI supercomputer. 

The companies aim to create customized AI models and agents that Novo Nordisk can use for early research and clinical development and to apply advanced simulation and physical AI technologies. 

“AI is essential for every industry, and there’s no other field that will benefit more from acceleration than drug discovery,” said Rory Kelleher, senior director of business development for life sciences at NVIDIA. “Working with Novo Nordisk, we’re advancing critical R&D applications with fundamental tools that can harness the full potential of generative and agentic AI to improve pharmaceutical development.” 

DCAI’s Gefion supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, provides Novo Nordisk an AI factory for running drug discovery and agentic AI workloads. Novo Nordisk will use NVIDIA BioNeMo for generative AI-powered drug discovery, NVIDIA NIM and NVIDIA NeMo microservices for building customized agentic workflows, and the NVIDIA Omniverse platform to create physically accurate simulation environments for developing physical AI applications. 

Novo Nordisk researchers will focus on several AI research programs, including using single-cell models to predict cellular responses to drug candidates and structures, as well as designing models to build molecules with drug-like properties. The companies will also collaborate on tapping Novo Nordisk’s vast global scientific literature to build biomedical large language models, enabling researchers to uncover correlations between genes, proteins and diseases. 

“By coupling NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform and expertise with Novo’s deep expertise in life sciences research and development, we aim to build custom models that will aid our scientists in developing new medicines faster and more efficiently,” said Mishal Patel, senior vice president, AI and digital innovation at Novo Nordisk. “Gefion will allow us to run experiments at an unprecedented scale.”