TECHNOLOGY & DATA MANAGEMENT S
ince last year, NVIDIA has generated shockwaves in many industries – with healthcare being no exception. Boasting a market cap of $2.92trn,
the tech powerhouse is one of the most valuable companies in the world – and even briefly occupied the global top spot last month. Shares in NVIDIA— up about 785% since the start of 2023— paint the rise of the company and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). Alongside this, NVIDIA has been expanding
its presence in the healthcare sector, with activities ranging from developing drug discovery applications such as the BioNeMo tool kits to partnerships with heavyweights such as Johnson & Johnson MedTech for surgical technologies. In an exclusive interview with Pharmaceutical Technology, NVIDIA’s EMEA business development lead for healthcare and life sciences David Ruau, talks about the company’s ever-strengthening affinity with healthcare, and how the future of the technology’s use in the sector might look amid a dynamic regulatory environment and changing public perception. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Robert Barrie [RB]: NVIDIA has made plenty of in-roads into healthcare recently. Where are the biggest opportunities in this sector?
David Ruau [DR]: I would rephrase the premise of the question. I would instead say that healthcare made in-roads into AI for treating patients, inventing new drugs, and developing new technologies in medical devices. There is a massive amount of data generated in healthcare, and that naturally led to the need to have an accelerated computing platform. And yes, NVIDIA has been ideally placed to fulfil this particular market segment because of our graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities. The GPU, being a processing unit that allows parallel processing of data on a massive scale, is a game-changing approach. It is not that we pushed into the healthcare domain for AI, it was an emerging market, and we grew with it. A good use case for us has been digital radiology and medical imaging. Medical
32 | Outsourcing in Clinical Trials Handbook
imaging has been one of the very first sectors of the healthcare market that we addressed, and we made very strong partnerships in this space. AI has been very important for image processing. Applications for digital radiology popped up and became much more mainstream—being able to process images such as the segmentation of organs and bones. That’s what our partners have developed. And yes, they needed a computing platform which was fit for purpose, and that was by NVIDIA.
RB: NVIDIA has partnerships with big pharma such as Amgen and Genentech. Do you think the majority of drugs arriving to market in the future will be designed by AI?
DR: The classic question! A drug is never designed by one single software. If readers should take away one thing from this interview, it’s that it takes a large group of individuals, skills, and know-how to deliver a drug to patients. It’s not only a story about algorithms. We can’t just generate a prompt (“the greatest prompt in history!”) and ask it to create a new drug for a particular disease and have it go and do everything: target ID, design, animal testing, toxicity, and submission to the FDA. At least for now, it does not work like that. AI provides tools and increases our capacity
to process data. Instead of searching and reading every single paper, you can ask an AI agent to summarise a lot of them. It helps humans make sense of such a vast volume
“If readers should take away one thing from this interview, it’s that it takes a large group of individuals, skills, and know-how to deliver a drug to patients”
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