NVIDIA and Cognizant Announce AI Pharma Partnership

Cognizant is advancing the application of generative AI (gen AI) technology with the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform to solve complex challenges of drug discovery in the life sciences industry, such as improving productivity in the development process and increasing the speed at which new, life-saving treatments can be brought to market. 

Traditional drug discovery methodologies are process intensive and require the analysis of vast repositories of scientific literature and clinical data in order to reveal relevant insights. Moreover, traditional methods are burdened with high costs and long development lifecycles with a high rate of failure. By leveraging gen AI technologies, clinical researchers can rapidly sift through extensive datasets, more accurately predict interactions between drug compounds and create new, viable drug development pathways.

“More than any other technological breakthrough in recent decades, generative AI has the potential to revolutionise the way new drugs are researched, developed and brought to market, making the creation of lifesaving discoveries faster, smarter and more accessible to all,” said Anna Elango, EVP, Cognizant’s Core Technologies & Insights. “By collaborating with NVIDIA, Cognizant can open the path to realising this vision safely, responsibly and cost-effectively for our life sciences clients.”

By leveraging its deep life sciences and AI domain expertise and NVIDIA’s pretrained, industry-specific generative AI models offered as part of BioNeMo, Cognizant aims to give clients access to a suite of model-making services, including pretrained models, cutting-edge frameworks, and APIs, that offers clients the quickest path to train and customise enterprise models using their proprietary data. The offering is intended to enable this with reduced manual intervention for data analysis, and without the need to write elaborate code and build or maintain infrastructure. 

“Generative AI will drive the next wave of enterprise productivity gains across industries, enabled by the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform,” said Alvin DaCosta, VP, Global Consulting Partner Organisation, NVIDIA. “Using NVIDIA BioNeMo, Cognizant will help provide its life sciences clients with advanced, secure and reliable AI services to drive improved outcomes with custom drug discovery applications.”

Cognizant intends to pursue additional applications by collaborating with NVIDIA in areas such as manufacturing and automotive engineering, where gen AI has the potential to enhance productivity, optimise costs and bring innovation to market more quickly. Cognizant intends to establish an NVIDIA AI Center of Excellence this year to further innovate with NVIDIA technologies, including the NVIDIA Metropolis, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA AI Enterprise platforms, for the benefit of clients across industries around the world.