Eli Lilly Partners with Nvidia on $1 Billion AI Drug Discovery Supercomputer

Eli Lilly has partnered with Nvidia to build a $1 billion AI-powered supercomputer dedicated to drug discovery, marking a significant investment by the $900 billion pharmaceutical company in artificial intelligence technology for medicine development.

In September of last year, Lilly launched its TuneLab platform, providing other drugmakers with digital access to all of the pharma giant's proprietary wisdom about how a potential drug molecule might perform. While not a replacement for traditional real-world clinical testing, TuneLab does give researchers a good idea of what likely works and what likely won't. This saves valuable time and money, allowing drug companies to focus on their very best prospects.

Lilly announced in October it was teaming up with AI powerhouse Nvidia, committing $1 billion to build a supercomputer with the sole purpose of "interrogating biology at scale, deepening our understanding of disease and translating that knowledge into meaningful advances for people served by Lilly medicines as well as the broader life sciences ecosystem," according to the company's chief AI officer.

By January of this year, this collaboration had gelled in the form of a co-innovation lab intended to "accelerate and scale medicine discovery and production," starting by linking the company's clinical testing data with the platform's digital/computational capabilities, sharing data in real time.

The AI platform already has a couple of third-party biopharma customers, with more likely waiting to complete a deeper review of what this new technological tool can do. Recursion Pharmaceuticals and AbCellera Biologics are a couple of other names offering AI-powered drug discovery solutions as well, along with a handful of others.

An outlook from Straits Research suggests the AI-powered drug discovery industry is poised to grow at an average annual pace of 30% through 2034, when it will be worth more than $20 billion. That's still only a fraction of Eli Lilly's current yearly revenue of around $65 billion.

With the average cost of bringing a new drug to the market now in the ballpark of $1 billion, the time and cost savings offered by AI-powered platforms represent significant value for pharmaceutical development. Owning a powerful drug development platform not only allows the company to optimize its own research work, but it gives Lilly access to potential partnerships with smaller pharmaceutical companies that may have come up with a fantastic new drug of their own, but need a bigger name to see it all the way through approval and then help with marketing it.