AI accelerates drug discovery
Tech and biotechs pushed AI drug R&D forward this week — Persistent Systems and Viva Biotech unveiled NVIDIA‑powered generative‑molecule and lab‑in‑the‑loop screening platforms, and a major collaboration including EMBL‑EBI, DeepMind and NVIDIA added millions of predicted protein‑complex structures to AlphaFold’s database. Investors are already raising the bar for the sector, demanding proprietary data, focused clinical pipelines and clear clinical readouts before writing big checks. (enterpriseai.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (prnewswire.com) (prnewswire.com) (bioengineer.org) (biospace.com)
Persistent Systems named its solution Generative Molecules and Virtual Screening (GenMolVS) and says it runs on NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform plus the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit. (prnewswire.com)) The company claims GenMolVS will compress months‑long discovery experiments into days by delivering production‑grade agentic AI applications for computational drug discovery for biopharma clients. (persistent.com)) Viva Biotech described a “Lab‑in‑the‑Loop” workflow that pairs NVIDIA BioNeMo with high‑throughput protein production and biophysical evaluation to design mini‑binders against the ActRIIA receptor. (prnewswire.com)) EMBL‑EBI, DeepMind, NVIDIA and Seoul National University released millions of AI‑predicted protein‑complex structures into the AlphaFold Database, prioritizing complexes relevant to human health and disease. (ebi.ac.uk)) Nature reports the AlphaFold resource already contains roughly 200 million single‑protein predictions and the new release extends the database to include homodimers and other complex pairings. (nature.com)) Market specialists writing in BioSpace on March 17, 2026 say investors now demand proprietary data, tightly focused clinical pipelines and explicit clinical readouts from AI‑drug platforms before making major investments. (biospace.com)) Persistent is publicly listed (BSE: 533179; NSE: PERSISTENT) and has stated it will leverage NVIDIA AI Enterprise for specialised life‑sciences R&D use cases, including preclinical research. (tmcnet.com))
