NVIDIA Partners With Novo Nordisk and DCAI to Advance Drug Discovery
- Partnership combines NVIDIA's AI expertise with Novo Nordisk's life sciences knowledge for faster drug development
- Access to advanced NVIDIA tools (BioNeMo, NIM, NeMo, Omniverse) enhances drug discovery capabilities
- Early trials of Teton's AI care companion showed 25% reduction in nightshift duties
- Gefion supercomputer enables unprecedented scale of pharmaceutical experiments
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Insights
NVIDIA expands its healthcare AI footprint through strategic pharma partnerships, strengthening its position in the lucrative life sciences computing market.
NVIDIA's new collaboration with Novo Nordisk and Denmark's DCAI marks a significant expansion of its AI-powered drug discovery ecosystem. This strategic partnership leverages NVIDIA's full technology stack – including the DGX SuperPOD, BioNeMo for generative AI drug discovery, NIM and NeMo for agentic workflows, and Omniverse for simulations – establishing a comprehensive AI factory for pharmaceutical research.
The implementation on DCAI's Gefion supercomputer creates a sovereign computing infrastructure that allows Novo Nordisk to process sensitive healthcare data locally while applying cutting-edge AI. The specific use cases mentioned – predicting cellular responses to drug candidates and building biomedical language models from scientific literature – represent high-value applications that could significantly accelerate the drug discovery pipeline.
This partnership extends NVIDIA's platform strategy in life sciences, where the company is positioning itself as the essential infrastructure provider for AI-driven pharmaceutical research. By embedding its technology stack across Denmark's healthcare ecosystem through DCAI, NVIDIA is creating recurring revenue opportunities while making its tools indispensable to both established pharma companies and startups like Teton.
For NVIDIA, the pharmaceutical industry represents an ideal high-margin market with substantial computing requirements and customers willing to invest in premium AI infrastructure. This deal reinforces NVIDIA's strategic pivot toward industry-specific AI solutions rather than just hardware, potentially creating more stable, service-oriented revenue streams to complement its chip business.
This partnership signals a significant acceleration in Novo Nordisk's AI capabilities, potentially transforming its R&D productivity. By leveraging NVIDIA's specialized AI platforms on the Gefion supercomputer, Novo gains access to computational tools that have previously shown promise in reducing drug discovery timelines from years to months.
The specific AI applications mentioned – single-cell models for predicting drug responses and building biomedical language models from scientific literature – address two critical bottlenecks in pharmaceutical development. The cellular response models could significantly reduce costly late-stage failures by improving early prediction accuracy, while AI-powered literature analysis could uncover non-obvious connections between genes, proteins, and diseases that human researchers might miss.
For Novo Nordisk, already a leader in diabetes and obesity treatments, enhanced AI capabilities could help expand their therapeutic pipeline beyond these core areas. The partnership represents a strategic investment in maintaining competitive advantage in an industry where AI adoption is increasingly separating market leaders from followers.
The inclusion of "agentic AI" – autonomous systems that can design and run experiments with minimal human intervention – suggests Novo is pursuing a highly automated research paradigm. If successful, this approach could dramatically increase the number of drug candidates screened while reducing costs.
The sovereign computing aspect through DCAI's Gefion supercomputer also addresses critical data privacy concerns in pharmaceutical research, allowing Novo to maintain control of proprietary data while still accessing world-class AI infrastructure.
Leading Global Pharma Joins Danish Enterprises, Startups and Public Health Systems Using AI Factories to Improve Drug Discovery and Healthcare
PARIS, June 11, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NVIDIA GTC Paris at VivaTech — NVIDIA today 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.”
Novo Nordisk Taps Advanced AI to Accelerate Innovation
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.”
Advancing Denmark’s Healthcare Ecosystem
DCAI owns and operates Gefion, Denmark’s flagship AI supercomputer. DCAI is helping lower the barrier for accessing advanced computing capabilities and enabling companies in Denmark to pursue research and development across healthcare and drug discovery.
“With Gefion’s computational power, we can tackle the toughest R&D challenges, with the ultimate goal of unlocking new possibilities for pharmaceutical research and development,” said Nadia Carlsten, CEO of DCAI. “By combining Gefion’s capabilities with NVIDIA’s expertise, our customers can accelerate innovation even further.”
Gefion has already been used by multiple customers to advance healthcare and drug discovery.
Teton, a Danish startup and member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups, is tapping into Gefion to accelerate the development of its AI care companion for hospitals, using cameras and sensors installed in patient rooms to create real-time 3D digital twins. This allows nurses to monitor patients remotely and receive alerts about potential health issues. Teton’s technology aims to reduce workload burden on nurses — freeing them up for higher-value tasks — and improve patient care, with early trials showing up to a
Last month, DCAI announced that one of the first pharma companies to use Gefion will tap the supercomputer to accelerate drug discovery and development in neurological and psychiatric disorders. Another venture-backed company is using Gefion to accelerate the development of oral alternatives to widely used biologics and to target proteins that are currently difficult or impossible to drug with available compounds.
Gefion will also be used as part of an effort by Danish health organizations to unite previously siloed health data into a single national analysis platform, which will provide researchers with secure access to interconnected health data. Along with supercomputing resources, this will make it easier to analyze large datasets, identify disease patterns earlier and develop more personalized treatments.
Watch the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at VivaTech, and explore GTC Paris sessions.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in accelerated computing.
For further information, contact:
Janette Ciborowski
Enterprise Communications
NVIDIA Corporation
+1-734-330-8817
jciborowski@nvidia.com
Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: working with Novo Nordisk, NVIDIA advancing critical R&D applications with fundamental tools that can harness the full potential of generative and agentic AI to improve pharmaceutical development; the benefits, impact, performance, and availability of NVIDIA’s products, services, and technologies; expectations with respect to NVIDIA’s third party arrangements, including with its collaborators and partners; expectations with respect to technology developments; and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to the “safe harbor” created by those sections based on management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic and political conditions; NVIDIA’s reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test NVIDIA’s products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to NVIDIA’s existing product and technologies; market acceptance of NVIDIA’s products or NVIDIA’s partners’ products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of NVIDIA’s products or technologies when integrated into systems; and changes in applicable laws and regulations, as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company’s website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
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