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Amgen to Build Generative AI Models for Novel Human Data Insights and Drug Discovery
Biotechnology company plans to advance drug discovery using NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD-powered insights from world-leading human datasets.
Generative AI is transforming drug research and development, enabling new discoveries faster than ever — and Amgen, one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, is tapping the technology to power its research.
Amgen will build AI models trained to analyse one of the world’s largest human datasets on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, a full-stack data centre platform, that will be installed at Amgen’s deCODE genetics’ headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland. The system will be named Freyja in honor of the powerful, life-giving Norse goddess associated with the ability to predict the future.
Freyja will be used to build a human diversity atlas for drug target and disease-specific biomarker discovery, providing vital diagnostics for monitoring disease progression and regression. The system will also help develop AI-driven precision medicine models, potentially enabling individualised therapies for patients with serious diseases.
Amgen plans to integrate the DGX SuperPOD, which will feature 31 NVIDIA DGX H100 nodes totalling 248 H100 Tensor Core GPUs, to train state-of-the-art AI models in days rather than months, enabling researchers to more efficiently analyse and learn from data in their search for novel health and therapeutics insights.
“For more than a decade, Amgen has been preparing for this hinge moment we are seeing in the industry, powered by the union of technology and biotechnology,” said David M. Reese, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Amgen. “We look forward to combining the breadth and maturity of our world-class human data capabilities at Amgen with NVIDIA’s technologies."
The goal of deCODE founder and CEO Kári Stefánsson in starting the company was to understand human disease by looking at the diversity of the human genome. He predicted in a recent Amgen podcast that within the next 10 years, doctors will routinely use genetics to explore uncommon diseases in patients.
NVIDIA Generative AI Is Opening the Next Era of Drug Discovery and Design
NVIDIA BioNeMo, which is fuelling the computer-aided drug discovery ecosystem, now features more than a dozen generative AI models and cloud services.
NVIDIA has been preparing for this moment for over a decade, building deep domain expertise, creating the NVIDIA Clara healthcare-specific computing platform and expanding its work with a rich ecosystem of partners. Healthcare customers and partners already consume well over a billion dollars in NVIDIA GPU computing each year — directly and indirectly through cloud partners.
In the $250 billion field of drug discovery, these efforts are meeting an inflection point: R&D teams can now represent drugs inside a computer.
By harnessing emerging generative AI tools, drug discovery teams observe foundational building blocks of molecular sequence, structure, function and meaning — allowing them to generate or design novel molecules likely to possess desired properties. With these capabilities, researchers can curate a more precise field of drug candidates to investigate, reducing the need for expensive, time-consuming physical experiments.
Accelerating this shift is NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI platform that provides services to develop, customise and deploy foundation models for drug discovery.
Used by pharmaceutical, techbio and software companies, BioNeMo offers a new class of computational methods for drug research and development, enabling scientists to integrate generative AI to reduce experiments and, in some cases, replace them altogether.