Cognizant partners Nvidia to boost drug discovery with gen AI for pharma clients

Information technology company Cognizant announced on Tuesday that it is advancing the application of generative AI (gen AI) technology with US chip giant Nvidia's BioNeMo platform.

The companies are looking to solve complex challenges of drug discovery in the life sciences industry, such as improving productivity in the development process and increasing the speed at which new, life-saving treatments can be brought to market.

Traditional drug discovery methodologies are process-intensive and require the analysis of vast repositories of scientific literature and clinical data to reveal relevant insights. Moreover, traditional methods are burdened with high costs and long development lifecycles with a high rate of failure. By leveraging gen AI technologies, clinical researchers can rapidly sift through extensive datasets, more accurately predict interactions between drug compounds, and create new, viable drug development pathways.

"More than any other technological breakthrough in recent decades, generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the way new drugs are researched, developed, and brought to market, making the creation of lifesaving discoveries faster, smarter, and more accessible to all," said Anna Elango, EVP of Cognizant's Core Technologies & Insights. "By collaborating with NVIDIA, Cognizant can open the path to realizing this vision safely, responsibly, and cost-effectively for our life sciences clients."

By leveraging its deep life sciences and AI domain expertise and NVIDIA's pretrained, industry-specific generative AI models offered as part of BioNeMo, Cognizant aims to give clients access to a suite of model-making services, including pretrained models, cutting-edge frameworks, and APIs, that offer clients the quickest path to train and customize enterprise models using their proprietary data. The offering is intended to enable this with reduced manual intervention for data analysis, and without the need to write elaborate code or build or maintain infrastructure.

"Generative AI will drive the next wave of enterprise productivity gains across industries, enabled by the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform," said Alvin DaCosta, VP of the Global Consulting Partner Organization at NVIDIA. "Using NVIDIA BioNeMo, Cognizant will help provide its life sciences clients with advanced, secure, and reliable AI services to drive improved outcomes with custom drug discovery applications."

Cognizant, which has its roots in India since 1994, collaborates with leading global firms in pharmaceuticals, biotech, and medical devices, covering the entire life sciences value chain from R&D to digital health. This work contributes to the industry's ability to enhance science, improve patient outcomes, and increase business value, by enabling a patient-centric approach and better interactions with healthcare professionals. Cognizant's life sciences offerings support more than 120 global manufacturing lines and more than 18 million patients with medical device company products.

The IT major intends to pursue additional applications by collaborating with NVIDIA in areas such as manufacturing and automotive engineering, where gen AI has the potential to enhance productivity, optimize costs, and bring innovation to market more quickly. Cognizant intends to establish an NVIDIA AI Center of Excellence this year to further innovate with NVIDIA technologies, including the NVIDIA Metropolis, NVIDIA Omniverse, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise platforms, for the benefit of clients across industries around the world.

Not just Cognizant, L&T Technology Services Ltd (LTTS), and Wipro last year partnered with Nvidia to help healthcare companies accelerate adoption of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) through AI-driven strategies, products, and services.

In September, Indian IT major Infosys announced a partnership with the aim to help enterprises with generative AI applications and solutions. Prior to that, NVIDIA has partnered with Reliance India Limited and also with Tata Group to develop an AI cloud in India, aiming to provide critical infrastructure for computing.