Generative AI is remodeling drug analysis and improvement, enabling new discoveries sooner than ever — and Amgen, one of many world’s main biotechnology corporations, is tapping the expertise to energy its analysis.
Amgen will construct AI fashions skilled to investigate one of many world’s largest human datasets on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, a full-stack knowledge heart platform, that shall be put in at Amgen’s deCODE genetics’ headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland. The system shall be named Freyja in honor of the highly effective, life-giving Norse goddess related to the flexibility to foretell the long run.
Freyja shall be used to construct a human variety atlas for drug goal and disease-specific biomarker discovery, offering important diagnostics for monitoring illness development and regression. The system may also assist develop AI-driven precision drugs fashions, probably enabling individualized therapies for sufferers with critical ailments.
Amgen plans to combine the DGX SuperPOD, which can function 31 NVIDIA DGX H100 nodes totaling 248 H100 Tensor Core GPUs, to coach state-of-the-art AI fashions in days reasonably than months, enabling researchers to extra effectively analyze and study from knowledge of their seek for novel well being and therapeutics insights.
“For greater than a decade, Amgen has been getting ready for this hinge second we’re seeing within the trade, powered by the union of expertise and biotechnology,” stated David M. Reese, govt vp and chief expertise officer at Amgen. “We stay up for combining the breadth and maturity of our world-class human knowledge capabilities at Amgen with NVIDIA’s applied sciences.”
The purpose of deCODE founder and CEO Kári Stefánsson in beginning the corporate was to grasp human illness by trying on the variety of the human genome. He predicted in a current Amgen podcast that throughout the subsequent 10 years, medical doctors will routinely use genetics to discover unusual ailments in sufferers.
“This SuperPOD has the potential to speed up our analysis by coaching fashions extra shortly and serving to us generate questions we’d not have in any other case thought to ask,” stated Stefánsson.
Placing the Tech in Biotechnology
Since its founding in 1996, deCODE has curated greater than 200 petabytes of de-identified human knowledge from practically 3 million people.
The corporate began by amassing de-identified knowledge from Icelanders, who’ve a wealthy heritage in genealogies that stretch again for hundreds of years. This population-scale knowledge from analysis volunteers gives distinctive insights into human variety because it applies to illness.
deCODE has additionally helped sequence greater than half one million human genomes from volunteers within the UK Biobank.
However drawing insights from this a lot knowledge requires highly effective AI programs.
By integrating highly effective new expertise, Amgen has a possibility to speed up the invention and improvement of life-changing medicines. In March 2023, NVIDIA introduced that Amgen turned one of many first corporations to make use of NVIDIA BioNeMo, which researchers have used to construct generative AI fashions to speed up drug discovery and improvement. Amgen researchers have additionally been accessing BioNeMo by way of NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service.
“Fashions skilled in BioNeMo can advance drug discovery on a number of fronts,” stated Marti Head, govt director of computational and knowledge sciences at Amgen. “Along with serving to develop medicine which might be simpler, they’ll additionally assist keep away from negative effects like immune responses, and new biologics might be made in quantity.”
By adopting DGX SuperPOD, Amgen is poised to realize unprecedented knowledge insights with the potential to vary the tempo and scope of drug discovery.
“The fusion of superior AI, groundbreaking developments in biology and molecular engineering and huge portions of human knowledge should not simply reshaping how we uncover and develop new medicines — they’re redefining drugs,” Reese stated.
Find out about NVIDIA’s AI platform for healthcare and life sciences.
