Microsoft announces collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate healthcare and life sciences innovation with advanced cloud, AI and accelerated computing capabilities

REDMOND, Wash., March 18, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. is expanding its collaboration with NVIDIA to bring the power of generative AI, the cloud and accelerated computing to healthcare and life sciences organizations. The collaboration will bring together the global scale, security and advanced computing capabilities of Microsoft Azure with NVIDIA DGX Cloud and the NVIDIA Clara suite of computing platforms, software and services to help healthcare and life sciences organizations accelerate innovation and improve patient care. Harnessing the immense power of the cloud, cutting-edge AI and advanced computing capabilities, the collaboration aims to accelerate clinical research and drug discovery, enhance medical image-based diagnostic technology, and increase access to precision medicine.

"Microsoft is building on its longstanding collaboration with NVIDIA to empower the healthcare and life sciences industry with the power of Azure and generative AI, helping unlock new horizons for clinical research, drug discovery and patient care worldwide," said Peter Durlach, corporate vice president, Health & Life Sciences, Microsoft. "Through this collaboration, we aim to help the industry unlock breakthroughs in healthcare, making care more precise, accessible and effective to deliver a meaningful difference in the lives of patients globally."

"The convergence of AI, cloud computing and healthcare is set to transform patient care," said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare, NVIDIA. "Our collaboration with Microsoft will help unlock new possibilities and drive meaningful impact for patients worldwide."

The expanded collaboration will extend opportunities for healthcare providers, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and medical device developers to innovate rapidly across clinical research, drug discovery and care delivery with improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Faster drug discovery with NVIDIA BioNeMo on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, hosted on Microsoft Azure

Hosted on NVIDIA DGX Cloud on Azure, NVIDIA BioNeMo offers the quickest path to AI model development and deployment, accelerating the journey to AI-powered drug discovery. BioNeMo is a generative AI platform for drug discovery that simplifies and accelerates the training of models on proprietary data and scales the deployment of models for drug discovery applications. By analyzing vast datasets with unprecedented speed and precision, it can help scientists identify potential drug candidates more efficiently. The implications are profound: faster access to lifesaving therapies for patients worldwide.

Enhancing clinical research and care delivery with imaging-based AI diagnostic technology leveraging Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA MONAI and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network

The combination of the power of Azure, NVIDIA MONAI (Medical Open Network for AI), and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network (PIN) enables safe and effective development, validation, deployment and evaluation of medical imaging AI models at scale. With the combined offering, developers can build highly performant medical imaging AI models, healthcare providers can deploy a single PIN platform for running a wide array of third-party AI models integrated into clinical workflows, and clinical researchers can accelerate drug discovery. For example, Mass General Brigham AI leveraged MONAI and PIN in the aftermath of COVID-19 to support a federated approach to build models capable of assessing lung function and predicting oxygen requirements for symptomatic patients.

Additionally, Flywheel is providing a highly optimized imaging data management application for data scientists, integrated with MONAI and built on Azure AI, that significantly improves the way medical imaging data are curated and greatly reduces the time needed for research data preparation and medical AI model training. 

Flywheel, NVIDIA and researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health are also working together to revolutionize medical imaging research through AI technology. The collaboration combines the medical research insights of the UW–Madison team, Flywheel's imaging data platform and NVIDIA MONAI microservices, powered by Azure, to enable automated anatomical study classifications. The initiative has the potential to revolutionize medical imaging curation and greatly reduce the time needed for research data preparation, representing a significant leap toward enabling AI-driven medical breakthroughs.

"Our team at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health is focused on applying advanced technology to boost our research efforts and make it easier for our study teams to access large-scale datasets," said John Garrett, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology and medical physics and director of imaging informatics at UW–Madison. "Through this initiative, we're able to harness advanced methods and take advantage of Flywheel and NVIDIA's platforms and tools to scale our data curation process, allowing us to spend more time on research projects and training AI models."

Accelerating genomics analysis with the SOPHiA DDM^TM Platform on Azure powered by NVIDIA Parabricks

Microsoft, NVIDIA and SOPHiA GENETICS are collaborating to leverage combined expertise in technology and genomics to develop a streamlined, scalable and comprehensive whole-genome analytical solution. As part of this collaboration, the SOPHiA DDM Software-as-a-Service platform, hosted on Azure, will be powered by NVIDIA Parabricks for SOPHiA DDM's whole genome application. Parabricks is a scalable genomics analysis software suite that leverages full-stack accelerated computing to process whole genomes in minutes. Compatible with all leading sequencing instruments, Parabricks supports diverse bioinformatics workflows and integrates AI for accuracy and customization. SOPHiA GENETICS will also use powerful NVIDIA GPUs on Azure to process computationally heavy workloads, providing a scalable and efficient solution.

"At SOPHiA GENETICS, we offer a universal cloud-based platform — the SOPHiA DDM™ platform — that enables healthcare institutions to get quick, robust and actionable insights from their data. Our technology analyzes genomic data, alongside other modalities, to provide collective intelligence for institutions worldwide to support discoveries, treatment decisions and drug development efforts, benefiting patients with cancer and rare inherited genetic disorders. By leveraging the capabilities of Azure and NVIDIA technology, we will be able to scale our top analytical performance, short turnaround time and cost-effective solutions to encompass the whole genome, further expanding our ability to benefit our customers and their patients," said Abhimanyu Verma, chief technology officer, SOPHiA GENETICS.

Azure AI: Democratizing AI for healthcare professionals

Microsoft is collaborating with NVIDIA to make a future suite of NVIDIA healthcare microservices available on Azure AI for optimized inference and fine-tuning. Once available, researchers, clinicians and developers can explore these state-of-the-art models and deploy them as endpoints in the Azure AI Model Catalog. Azure AI democratizes AI adoption for users in healthcare, from radiologists fine-tuning an AI algorithm to geneticists deciphering complex variants, while driving innovation and redefining patient care through collaboration across disciplines.

Microsoft aims to propel healthcare and life sciences into an exciting new era of medicine, helping unlock transformative possibilities for patients worldwide. The combination of the global scale, security and advanced computing capabilities of Microsoft Azure with NVIDIA DGX Cloud and the NVIDIA Clara suite is set to accelerate advances in clinical research, drug discovery and care delivery.

Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.