NVIDIA allies with IQVIA, Mayo Clinic and Illumina on healthcare AI

NVIDIA today announced at JP Morgan partnerships with IQVIA, Illumina, Mayo Clinic and Arc Institute that center on accelerating biomedical AI across genomics, drug development, and clinical diagnostics.

The collaborations aim to tap advanced computing across the healthcare sector, with IQVIA deploying AI agents for clinical trials, Illumina integrating genomic analysis tools, Mayo Clinic developing digital pathology models, and Arc Institute advancing open-source biomedical AI.

These partnerships signal a broader shift toward agentic AI systems in healthcare, where autonomous agents can reduce administrative burden in clinical trials, enhance genomic analysis, and accelerate drug discovery workflows.

“AI agents are the new digital workforce working for and with us,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang last week at CES. “AI agents are a system of models that reason about a mission, break it down into tasks and retrieve data or use tools to generate a quality response.”

The new initiatives involve healthcare and life sciences leaders IQVIA, Illumina, Mayo Clinic and Arc Institute, all tapping into NVIDIA’s full-stack AI solutions.

IQVIA: Domain-specific AI agents to streamline clinical research

IQVIA, a global provider of clinical research services and healthcare analytics, will tap NVIDIA AI Foundry service to develop specialized foundation models and AI agents. These systems are trained on IQVIA’s healthcare dataset—encompassing over 64 petabytes of clinical and commercial information—and are guided by domain expertise in life sciences workflows. The resulting applications aim to streamline critical processes in clinical trials, from patient recruitment to regulatory submissions, potentially reducing the traditionally lengthy development cycle.

Jensen Huang at GTC in 2024

“In the future, these AI agents are essentially digital workforce that are working alongside your employees, working doing things for you on your behalf,” Huang said in his CES address.

Illumina: Accelerating multiomics analysis for precision medicine

Illumina, a leader in DNA sequencing and informatics, is collaborating with NVIDIA to integrate GPU-accelerated computing into its DRAGEN sequencing software. As multiomics data—spanning genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics—continues to surge, Illumina aims to manage expanding datasets faster and more efficiently, bringing advanced analysis tools to more researchers worldwide.

Mayo Clinic: AI-driven digital pathology with NVIDIA DGX Blackwell

Mayo Clinic will deploy NVIDIA’s DGX Blackwell systems in the context of AI-driven digital pathology. The initiative builds on Mayo’s digital pathology platform, which houses 20 million whole-slide images correlated with 10 million patient records. The organizations expect the information to facilitate the development of foundation models for pathological analysis.

Arc Institute: Large-scale biology models for drug discovery

Arc Institute, a Palo Alto-based research organization operating at the intersection of biology and machine learning, is advancing open-source biomedical AI development through NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform and DGX Cloud infrastructure. The institute’s researchers are developing large-scale models that integrate multiple biological modalities—including DNA, RNA, and proteins—to drive research in synthetic biology and drug discovery.

These partnerships will make use of NVIDIA’s growing AI technology stack, including NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA Blueprints for deployment optimization.

[For more on NVIDIA’s strategy to extend the dominion of AI over the physical world, check out “NVIDIA heralds physical AI era with Cosmos platform launch“]