On Monday, Nvidia, a leading force in AI development, set the stage for transformative changes in healthcare at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. With a series of announcements geared towards scaling AI models, Nvidia is forging powerful collaborations that aim to redefine the intersection of technology and medicine.

Among the highlights of Nvidia’s announcements was a landmark partnership with the renowned Mayo Clinic. This collaboration centers on accelerating the development of pathology foundation models, leveraging Mayo Clinic’s extensive digital pathology platform, which holds a staggering 20 million whole-slide images along with 10 million related patient records. To enhance the efficiency of foundation model development, Mayo Clinic will implement Nvidia’s cutting-edge DGX Blackwell AI systems alongside Monai, Nvidia’s healthcare imaging platform.

Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president and general manager of healthcare, elaborated on the ambitious vision for this partnership: “Our ultimate goal is to create a human digital twin.” This innovative idea encompasses a dynamic digital representation that integrates medical imaging, pathology, health records, and data from wearables. By utilizing advanced AI models and vision-language models such as Cosmos Nemotron, Mayo Clinic and Nvidia aim to establish foundational technologies that will spark new applications in drug discovery and diagnostic medicine.

In another significant move, Nvidia has teamed up with IQVIA, a leading life sciences analytics and clinical research firm. With a focus on generating AI foundation models, IQVIA plans to implement Nvidia’s AI foundry service to enhance its capabilities. This service enables the swift development of AI agents, tasked with specific operations without human involvement, all while drawing insights from an impressive dataset of 64 petabytes encompassing over a billion anonymized patients from across 100 countries.

Powell emphasized the potential of these AI agents, which can perceive, reason, plan, and take action independently. “Agent AI represents a frontier in AI evolution,” she stated, underscoring its implications for the healthcare landscape.

On the biopharma front, Nvidia’s collaboration with the renowned DNA sequencing company Illumina marks another significant venture. Illumina will harness Nvidia’s computing and AI tools to enhance its multiomics analysis technology, which processes data spanning the genome, transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, metabolome, and microbiome. This partnership aims to unlock the next generation of genomic insights, making critical advancements in drug discovery and precision medicine more accessible.

Finally, Nvidia has also announced a partnership with the Arc Institute, a research organization dedicated to exploring the confluence of biology and machine learning. This collaboration will concentrate on developing AI tools that propel biomedical discovery, with a focus on creating versatile foundation models applicable across various biological modalities, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. Powell emphasized the commitment to open-source sharing of their findings via BioNeMo, fostering a spirit of collaboration in the pursuit of large-scale biomedical research.