Nvidia, the computer chip giant, continues its deep dive into expanding artificial intelligence technology in the medtech and cancer research arenas, this time with diagnostics maker Droplet Biosciences.
Droplet, which focuses on lymph-based liquid biopsy testing, has leveraged Nvidia’s AI infrastructure Parabricks, a GPU-accelerated software that dramatically speeds genomic data analysis for DNA sequencing, the company said in a March 3 press release.
The diagnostics company cited a new case study that indicated a significant reduction in key analysis steps that went from days to hours using Parabricks.
Variant calling, which identifies differences between a person’s DNA sequence and a known reference genome to detect genetic variations responsible for diseases, was reduced from taking up to 36 hours to less than three hours. Sequence alignment saw a reduction from about 10 hours to just under one hour with overall analysis timelines shrunk from 10 days to two days.
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“By leveraging NVIDIA Parabricks’ acceleration, we’ve been able to compress some of our most computationally intensive steps from more than a day down to just a few hours,” Wendy Winckler, Ph.D., Droplet’s chief science officer, said in a statement. “That speed matters. It means clinicians can get critical information sooner, make decisions at a more impactful moment, and ultimately deliver better, more personalized care for patients.”
Nvidia has been on a mission this past year to ink collaboration deals within the pharma, medtech and healthcare sectors.
It signed on with Eli Lilly to build a new supercomputer that would be the largest owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company. J&J MedTech, the medical technology wing of the pharma and life sciences giant, is using Nvidia’s Isaac for Healthcare—its healthcare robotics division—to create new digital twins, which are programs that simulate how new systems may perform in real-world situations.
Health tech company Innovaccer and Austin-based Diligent Robotics, meanwhile, have also have inked deals with Nvidia this past year.
In October, the tech giant announced it is partnering with Oracle and the Department of Energy to build the agency’s largest AI supercomputer for scientific discovery as part of an initiative to build seven new AI supercomputers to advance the nation’s science.
