The Arc Institute today announced that it is working with NVIDIA to accelerate scientific research by developing and sharing powerful computational models and tools that advance biomedical discovery. The work brings together Arc’s biology researchers with NVIDIA's computing experts and both organizations' machine learning teams to advance the capabilities of the global biomedical research community.
“The convergence of biology and artificial intelligence holds exciting promise to transform the way we do science,” said Arc Co-Founder, Core Investigator, and Executive Director Silvana Konermann. “Our collaboration with NVIDIA will pioneer new approaches to exploring and engineering living systems, accelerating insights into complex human disease.”
“Generative AI has revolutionized our ability to model complex biology digitally, offering researchers a new instrument to scale science through machine learning,” said Anthony Costa, Director of Digital Biology at NVIDIA. “Combining Arc Institute's researchers and NVIDIA's AI experts, we are working to turn massive scientific datasets into invaluable scientific tools and insights.”
Arc’s biology and machine learning researchers are working with NVIDIA’s engineers to scale the potential of AI models to design, predict, and understand biology. This partnership will build on Arc’s previous work with the Evo model, which is capable of both prediction and design at the level of DNA and across RNA and proteins in single-celled organisms.
“Machine learning provides a universal framework that harnesses data, compute, and scale to learn complex patterns from diverse data that would not be discernible with the human eye alone," said Arc Co-Founder and Core Investigator Patrick Hsu, and one of Evo’s lead researchers. “Evo is a foundation model for biology–a single unifying system that can work across different modalities and scales of complexity, from individual base pairs all the way up to genome-scale sequences.”
"By training these models on diverse biological data, we aim to discover emergent properties similar to those found in language, videos, and robotics,” said Brian Hie, one of Evo’s lead researchers and an Arc Institute Innovation Investigator in Residence. “We're enabling researchers to leverage complex generative models in ways that could unlock biological design at scales previously inaccessible to science."
Arc Institute is contributing to and sharing its upcoming models with global developers through the open-source NVIDIA BioNeMo Framework, a collection of accelerated computing tools for biomolecular research. These models will also be available as NVIDIA NIM microservices, a set of optimized, easy-to-use, portable AI microservices designed to unlock an entirely new scale of AI-driven biomolecular therapeutic design exploration.
As part of the partnership, Arc biology and machine learning researchers can use BioNeMo via NVIDIA DGX Cloud on AWS, which gives them access to a high-performance, fully managed AI platform optimized for large-scale, distributed training with NVIDIA AI software and expertise.
Arc and NVIDIA will detail the first outputs of their partnership later this year.
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The Arc Institute (@arcinstitute) is an independent nonprofit research organization located in Palo Alto, California, that aims to accelerate scientific progress and understand the root causes of complex diseases. Arc’s model gives scientists complete freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research agendas and fosters deep interdisciplinary collaboration.