Eli Lilly and NVIDIA have announced a major partnership with a total investment of $1 billion. The companies are establishing a joint R&D center in Silicon Valley aimed at transforming the drug discovery process over the next 5 years by replacing traditional wet lab experiments with computation.
The project addresses the main bottleneck of modern pharma—the speed and cost of R&D. Instead of the classical screening of thousands of compounds, the new entity will focus on generating and validating candidates in a virtual environment. NVIDIA engineers and Lilly scientists will work in a shared space, combining biological expertise with advanced hardware capabilities.
“Combining our data sets with NVIDIA’s computing power will allow us to reimagine the drug discovery process. We are creating conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone, fostering a startup environment backed by industry giants’ resources,” stated David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly.
Technological Foundation
The new center’s infrastructure is built on high-performance computing solutions:
- NVIDIA BioNeMo: A specialized generative AI platform trained on biological data. It allows not only for analysis but also for the design of protein structures and DNA/RNA molecules.
- NVIDIA DGX Cloud: A supercomputing cluster providing the power needed to train heavy models and simulate biological processes with atomic precision.
Key Research Areas
Investments will target the automation of three critical development stages:
- Generative Chemistry: Designing novel molecules with specific therapeutic properties using neural networks, bypassing random screening.
- Target Identification: Deep analysis of omics data to identify proteins that can be targeted to halt disease progression.
- ADMET Prediction: In silico modeling of drug behavior (toxicity, metabolism) prior to synthesis, significantly reducing failure risks in clinical trials.
Source: Eli Lilly and Company
