Microsoft has announced plans to broaden its partnership with NVIDIA to leverage generative AI, cloud technology and accelerated computing to enhance healthcare and life sciences innovation.

The collaboration will merge Microsoft Azure's global reach and advanced expertise with NVIDIA's DGX Cloud and Clara computing platforms to spur innovation and improve patient outcomes.

The initiative will offer healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers opportunities to execute swift innovations in clinical research, drug discovery and care delivery.

The key features of the partnership include accelerated drug discovery with BioNeMo on NVIDIA's DGX Cloud, hosted on Azure.

This approach will aid in expediting clinical research and drug discovery and boost access to precision therapies.

The collaboration will bolster clinical research and care delivery using imaging-based AI diagnostic technology through Azure, NVIDIA MONAI and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network.

The deal will also expedite genomics analysis with the SOPHiA DDM platform on Azure, powered by NVIDIA Parabricks.

Microsoft Health & Life Sciences corporate vice-president Peter Durlach stated: “Microsoft is building on its longstanding collaboration with NVIDIA to empower the healthcare and life sciences industry with the power of Azure and generative AI, helping unlock new horizons for clinical research, drug discovery and patient care worldwide.

“Through this collaboration, we aim to help the industry unlock breakthroughs in healthcare, making care more precise, accessible and effective to deliver a meaningful difference in the lives of patients globally.”

Cognizant is also advancing the application of generative AI technology with the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform to address drug discovery challenges in life sciences.

It seeks to enhance productivity in development and hasten the delivery of new treatments to the market.

By utilising generative AI technologies, clinical researchers, can quickly navigate vast datasets, predict drug compound interactions more accurately, and set out new drug development pathways.

Cognizant, with its deep expertise in life sciences and AI, aims to provide clients with access to BioNeMo's pre-trained generative AI models, frameworks and application programming interfaces for rapid model training and customisation using proprietary data.