Bristol Myers Squibb Hopes to Boost Drug Trials with NVIDIA Supercomputer

Biopharmaceutical manufacturer Bristol Myers Squibb will soon become the first life sciences firm to buy semiconductor maker NVIDIA’s latest generation supercomputer (Fierce Biotech).

What’s going on: BMS will “expand its infrastructure to deploy … the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD that is enabled with AIDGX Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. The result will be the ‘most powerful and energy-efficient single-owned NVIDIA infrastructure in life sciences,’ BMS claimed in a July 20 release.”

• The move builds on a three-year partnership between the companies, which started when BMS first began using NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD infrastructure for its research and development.
• NVIDIA unveiled the Vera Rubin architecture, the successor to its current AI systems, earlier this year (Reuters, subscription).

Why it’s important: BMS is using the NVIDIA tech “to help discover and develop medicines across multiple disease areas,” according to Fierce Biotech.

• This most recent agreement between BMS and NVIDIA furthers BMS’ vision for hybrid intelligence, in which artificial intelligence and human researchers work together, BMS said.
• This means that researchers will spend fewer hours on manual tasks and more on “questions that require human judgment.”

Better medicine: Drug makers are increasingly looking to AI infrastructure to identify drug targets faster and increase the chances of experimental medications’ success in clinical trials, according to Reuters.

• BMS is already using AI to slash—by 20–30%—the time it takes to make the medications used in trials, BMS Chief Research Officer Robert Plenge said, adding that the figure could reach 50% in the next few years.