Recursion also unveiled its plans to speed up the creation of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry and NVIDIA will optimise and distribute them to biotechnology companies using its cloud services
Nvidia expands in AI-based drug discovery with Recursion investment. (Credit: Coolcaesar from Wikimedia Commons)
Chip designer Nvidia has announced an investment of $50m in US-based Recursion to accelerate the training of the latter’s foundation models in artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drug discovery.
Recursion also unveiled its plans to speed up the creation of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry. NVIDIA will optimise and distribute them to biotechnology companies using its cloud services.
Recursion plans to speed up the training of foundation models on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud to initiate a potential commercial license or release on BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery.
The TechBio company will use its proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and contains 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships.
Recursion CEO and co-founder Chris Gibson said: “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.”
NVIDIA will additionally aid in the optimisation and scaling of Recursion foundation models using the NVIDIA AI stack and NVIDIA’s full-stack computing capabilities.
Earlier this year, the chip designer launched BioNeMo, a cloud service for generative AI in drug development. Nvidia will then license these models to biotech firms via BioNeMo.
It provides tools for swiftly customising and deploying domain-specific, advanced biomolecular models at scale via cloud application programming interfaces (APIs).
Recursion plans to use this software to support both its existing and potential partners as well as its own internal workflow.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “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.”