HQ Team
July 12, 2023: Nvidia has invested $50 million in a clinical-stage biotechnology company, Recursion, to speed up the development of artificial intelligence models for drug recovery and may later license them, according to a statement.
The investment was executed as a private investment in public equity and Recursion plans to utilize its proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships, to accelerate the training of foundation models on Nivida’s cloud platform.
After achieving the result both companies may look for “for possible commercial license/release on BioNeMo, Nvidia’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery.”
Nvidia will also help optimize and scale Recursion foundation models leveraging the Nvidia AI stack and Nvidia’s full-stack computing expertise.
BioNeMo was announced earlier this year as a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery, offering tools to quickly customize and deploy domain-specific, state-of-the-art biomolecular models at scale through cloud APIs.
Recursion anticipates using this software to support its internal pipeline as well as its current and future partners.
Biological space
“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,” said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion.
“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.”
Recursion, through its recent acquisition of Valence Discovery, aims to accelerate the development of new technologies to feed the biopharma industry, while simultaneously democratizing access to large-scale models that have maximum impact in drug discovery.
Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Generative AI is a revolutionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
Recursion’s team is doing 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 up drug discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, he said.
