Roche Group member Genentech has entered a multi-year strategic generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered research partnership with NVIDIA to expedite the discovery and development of drugs.

The AI expertise, biological and molecular datasets and research capabilities of Genentech will be combined with NVIDIA’s computing capabilities and AI resources to accelerate drug development. 

The partnership will augment the AI research programmes of Genentech by converting its generative AI models and algorithms into an advanced AI platform, speeding up the discovery and delivery of new therapies. 

The companies will expedite Genentech's machine learning algorithms and models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud to deliver a training-as-a-service platform. 

The platform will be built on NVIDIA AI supercomputing and software such as NVIDIA BioNemo for generative AI functions.

Genentech research and early development executive vice-president and head Aviv Regev stated: “By harnessing the power of AI models and algorithms, with our unique data and experiments, we're unlocking scientific discoveries with incredible speed and generating insights at an unprecedented scale.

“Bringing science and technology together has always been a foundation of biomedical breakthroughs at Genentech.” 

The new partnership will also aid Genentech in expediting the "lab in a loop" process in which a wide range of experimental data is fed into computational models. This reveals patterns and generates new predictions that can be tested experimentally. 

Researchers can then evaluate the predictions in the lab setting and feed the results back to boost the computational model.

In September 2023, Genentech and PeptiDream signed a multi-target partnership and licence agreement for the discovery and development of new macrocyclic peptide-radioisotope drug conjugates.