Nvidia announced agreements this week with GE Healthcare to enhance medical imaging and Johnson & Johnson to apply generative AI in surgery. The advancements in healthcare at its 2024 GTC AI conference, which also featured the introduction of almost two dozen new AI-powered technologies with a healthcare emphasis, show how critical medicine is to Nvidia’s potential non-tech industry income streams.
The healthcare industry is on the cusp of a revolution driven by artificial intelligence (AI). NVIDIA, a leader in computing technology, is at the forefront of this transformation with its development of AI-powered healthcare tools. These tools leverage the power of generative AI, a subfield of AI that can create entirely new data, to revolutionize various aspects of medicine, from drug discovery to medical imaging.
Generative AI in Drug Discovery
Drug discovery is a time-consuming and expensive process. Traditionally, bringing a new drug to market can take years and billions of dollars. NVIDIA’s Clara for Biopharma platform utilizes generative AI to streamline this process. By analyzing vast datasets of molecular structures and properties, generative AI models can create novel drug candidates with the potential to treat a wide range of diseases. This significantly reduces the time and resources required for drug development, paving the way for faster and more efficient treatments.
Beyond Diagnosis: Generative AI for Personalized Medicine
“The reason why Nvidia is so popular today is because it basically provided the plumbing and the technology for something that you could not do simply before or if you had to do something like this you would need probably several times more time, money and cost,” said Raj Joshi, a technology analyst and senior vice president at Moody’s Ratings. “Health care, whether it’s biotechnology, chemicals, or drug discovery is a very powerful area.”
NVIDIA’s generative AI tools hold immense potential for personalized medicine. By analyzing a patient’s unique genetic makeup and medical history, generative AI models can create personalized treatment plans and predict how a patient might respond to different therapies. This allows doctors to tailor treatments to individual patients, improving the efficacy of care and reducing the risk of adverse side effects.
Specifically designed for drug discovery, the BioNeMo platform is a generative AI cloud service and one of NVIDIA’s biggest health-care capabilities to date.
Challenges and Ethical Considerations
While the potential of NVIDIA’s AI-powered healthcare tools is undeniable, there are challenges to consider. Integrating AI into healthcare workflows requires robust data security and privacy measures to protect sensitive patient information. Additionally, ensuring fairness and avoiding bias in AI algorithms is crucial to prevent discrimination in healthcare delivery.
“Over the last 18 months or so, we tend to believe it is more hope than hype because of the tangible outcomes and then the very compelling use cases how AI helped with the pharmaceutical industry, medtech industry or biotech industry,” said Arda Ural, EY Americas health and life sciences industry market leader.
According to Ural, the dangerous process of developing new drugs might take ten years or more from concept to clinical trials. It’s a procedure that has a significant failure rate and the potential to cost billions.
According to a poll conducted by EY in late 2023, around 41% of biotech CEOs stated they were considering “realistic” applications of generative AI for their businesses.
NVIDIA gave Recursion $50 million last year to support its drug development initiatives. Recursion is feeding its chemical and biological data into NVIDIA’s cloud platform to train its AI models. Additionally, the business has collaborated with Roche’s Genentech to create improved treatment plans and novel drugs. Additionally, it collaborated on drug development with Schrödinger in 2021.
However, to fully reap the benefits of AI in the healthcare industry, which are just now becoming apparent, leaders will need to get greater support from one of the largest workforces in the country. More than two-thirds of health science and wellness personnel are worried about the use of AI, and seven out of ten are concerned about AI adoption in the workplace, according to EY’s AI Anxiety in Business survey.