Qiagen, a Netherlands-based diagnostics maker, is linking with tech giant Nvidia in a collaboration aimed at boosting the ability of researchers to leverage AI in the drug discovery process.
The partnership is an effort to aid pharmaceutical and biotech researchers to help connect large amounts of complex biological data—genes, diseases, pathways, compounds and clinical evidence—and uncover the most relevant of those connections.
This is to better determine why they are important and if AI-generated insight is supported by credible biology, the company said in a May 19 press release.
As is common with the deals, the financial terms of the collaboration weren’t disclosed.
“Qiagen Digital Insights has spent more than 25 years building the biomedical knowledge foundation that researchers rely on to interpret complex biology,” Nitin Sood, a senior vice president at Qiagen, said in a statement. “Through this collaboration with Nvidia, we can accelerate the impact of that knowledge by combining it with advanced AI to help customers improve critical steps in drug discovery, from target identification to biomarker research and hypothesis generation.”
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The company’s Discovery platform merges information across genes, diseases, pathways, compounds, and incorporates graph-based retrieval AI drawing on frameworks such as PyTorch Geometric and GPU-accelerated GraphRAG systems, with delivery through the Nvidia BioNeMo platform.
The Nvidia partnership comes just a month after Qiagen rolled out its diagnostic for bloodstream infections, dubbed the QIAstat-Dx BCID GPF Plus AMR panel. The diagnostic is capable of identifying 20 gram-positive bacterial and fungal pathogen targets and 10 antimicrobial resistance markers from positive blood cultures and pure colonies.
It also comes after Nvidia recently teamed up with a multitude of life sciences companies recently, including Roche, Lilly and Verily, as more biopharmas and medtechs look to AI and big tech to help with their R&D.
