How Microsoft and Nvidia are Collaborating to Unlock Healthcare Innovation and Make Medicine More Personal

Sponsored by Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA

Peter Durlach, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences

Developing new drugs in a fraction of the time. Rapidly analyzing the whole genome. Predicting the oxygen needs of someone with a respiratory virus.

We’re thinking about innovations like these when we say we’re excited by expanding the collaboration between Microsoft and NVIDIA.

The latest generative AI, cloud, and accelerated computing capabilities are creating huge opportunities for healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology pioneers, and medical device developers.

Working together, and hand-in-hand with our industry partners, Microsoft and NVIDIA can help ‌unlock those opportunities, empowering healthcare and life sciences organizations worldwide to innovate faster, and help improve the quality and accessibility of patient care.

Developing new drugs, faster

AI has the power to accelerate drug discovery, but developing the necessary AI models also takes time. NVIDIA BioNeMo™ powered by NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud on Microsoft Azure, tackles this challenge head-on.

Created specifically to support the drug discovery journey, the generative AI platform can simplify the training of AI models on proprietary data. By rapidly analyzing massive datasets, it enables the deployment of new models at scale.

Related:Explore advanced AI solutions with Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC

This empowers scientists to identify potential drug candidates more quickly and efficiently, and focus their efforts more effectively. Much-needed medicines can be developed, trialed, and approved faster, and in some cases, lives that would have been lost can be saved.

Preparing data for innovation

Whether you’re conducting clinical research or training a medical AI model, you need to prepare your data before you can begin. This can be another time-consuming roadblock on the highway to healthcare innovation.

Flywheel’s cloud-based platform is built to address this issue, helping healthcare and life sciences organizations to identify and curate medical imaging data. NVIDIA is currently working with Flywheel and researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health to automate the classification of anatomical studies.

Made possible by NVIDIA MONAI (Medical Open Network for AI) microservices, hosted on Azure, the initiative aims to significantly reduce the time researchers need to spend on imaging data preparation.

Such breakthroughs in data curation are crucial steps toward realizing the full, transformative potential of healthcare AI.

With the right imaging data and powerful image-sharing networks, innovation can happen at a phenomenal speed. In the aftermath of the pandemic, for example, Mass General Brigham rapidly built AI models capable of assessing lung function in symptomatic patients and predicting their oxygen needs. Supporting its federated approach was MONAI and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network (PIN), which facilitates rapid deployment of both a wide array of commercially available and home grown imaging AI models on one common platform directly integrated into clinical workflow.

Accelerating genomic analysis

Genomics is another area in which the combination of complementary, cutting-edge technologies is opening the door to new, life-changing possibilities.

SOPHiA GENETICS provides a cloud-based platform that analyzes genomic data to support everything from drug development to treatment decisions. The integration between Microsoft and NVIDIA will help SOPHiA GENETICS develop a scalable, cost-effective solution for analyzing the whole genome.

The groundbreaking work brings together the SOPHiA DDM™ platform, hosted on Azure, and NVIDIA Parabricks^®—a scalable genomics analysis software suite capable of processing entire genomes in minutes, that belongs to the NVIDIA Clara™ suite for healthcare and life sciences.

Putting AI at the fingertips of healthcare professionals

Microsoft and NVIDIA continue to make AI, in all its forms, safely and securely accessible to healthcare professionals worldwide.

The more than two-dozen healthcare microservices recently launched by NVIDIA—including NVIDIA NIM, a set of easy-to-use microservices for accelerating the deployment of generative AI models, included in the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform available on Azure Marketplace—make it easy for researchers, developers, and practitioners to integrate generative AI into their existing applications and to build entirely new applications capable of transforming clinician workflows and patient outcomes.

Microsoft’s ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA will see such microservices available on Azure AI as endpoints in the Azure AI Model Catalog. These efforts to democratize AI adoption are essential. When you put AI at the fingertips of the radiologist or the medical geneticist, that’s when you begin to realize its true potential.

The power of collaboration

New drugs, faster diagnoses, better patient outcomes—technology is making them possible, but collaboration will make them a reality. While AI, cloud, and accelerated computing are powerful technologies, they’re much more powerful together. Learn more about Microsoft and NVIDIA solutions for AI.