NVIDIA, Novo Nordisk Collaborate to Bring AI Agents to Drug Discovery
By Bio-IT World Staff
June 11, 2025 | Jensen Huang has the same gripes about pre-trained generative AI models as the rest of us. “With pre-trained models, people said, ‘But it hallucinates! It makes things up!’ You’re absolutely right. ‘It doesn’t have access to the latest news and data information!’ Absolutely right. ‘It gives up without reasoning through problems; it’s as if every single answer has to be memorized from the past.’ You’re absolutely right,” the founder and CEO of NVIDIA acknowledged today at an NVIDIA GTC presentation in Paris.
But all of these “one-shot” AI models dedicated to retrieval, augmented generation, web search, and multimodal understand were necessary to arrive at agentic AI, which Huang called “a giant step function from one-shot AI.”
Today, NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Novo Nordisk to accelerate drug discovery efforts by creating customized AI models and agents that Novo Nordisk can use for early research and clinical development and to apply advanced simulation and physical AI technologies.
Through an example outlining how to set up a food truck business in Paris, Huang foresaw a future where each company will build its own agents to orchestrate tasks such as market research, financial forecasting, operations planning, and marketing. “You’re going to be hiring agents,” he predicted. “You’re going to need specialized agents on specialized tools and specialized skills.” NVIDIA offers a platform for building such specialized agents—the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform—and Novo Nordisk is using the platform to, “harness the full potential of generative and agentic AI to improve pharmaceutical development,” said Rory Kelleher, senior director of business development for life sciences at NVIDIA, in a press release aligned with the NVIDIA GTC Paris at VivaTech event.
The work will be done on DCAI’s Gefion supercomputer, Denmark’s flagship AI supercomputer powered by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Novo Nordisk will use NVIDIA BioNeMo for generative AI-powered drug discovery, NVIDIA NIM and NVIDIA NeMo microservices for building customized agentic workflows, and the NVIDIA Omniverse platform to create physically accurate simulation environments for developing physical AI applications.
Novo Nordisk researchers will focus on several AI research programs, including using single-cell models to predict cellular responses to drug candidates and structures, as well as designing models to build molecules with drug-like properties. The companies will also collaborate to tap Novo Nordisk’s vast global scientific literature to build biomedical large language models, enabling researchers to uncover correlations between genes, proteins, and diseases.
“By coupling NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform and expertise with Novo’s deep expertise in life sciences research and development, we aim to build custom models that will aid our scientists in developing new medicines faster and more efficiently,” said Mishal Patel, senior vice president, AI and digital innovation at Novo Nordisk, in the same statement.