Novo Nordisk partners with OpenAI to AI-power drug development

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has partnered with OpenAI to support drug research and development. Through the partnership, Novo Nordisk said it plans to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to analyse complex datasets, identify promising drug candidates and reduce the time required to move from research to patient.

The company said its use of AI has been structured with strict data protection, governance and human oversight to ensure ethical and compliant use. This latest partnership is being positioned as a key part of the company’s strategy to use AI to transform healthcare and enable it to bring new and better treatment options to patients faster.

In 2024, a break-out session run during its Capitals Market Day presented Novo Nordisk’s strategy, discussing how it uses data science and AI and its future plans. The presentation shows that the company set up an AI centre of excellence in 2021, and had begun ramping up investment in high performance computing and graphics processor units (GPUs) by 2023. The company said it has deployed a data pool called FounData, where all data from completed clinical trials are pooled and prepared for insights-generation.

It has also deployed NovoScribe, an AI-powered platform built using MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Amazon Bedrock and LangChain to automate and accelerate the creation of clinical study reports. Novo Nordisk said NovoScribe reduces the time to regulatory submissions.

At the time, the company said external partnerships and collaborations would continue to play an important role in reaching its AI ambitions.

Earlier this year, Christos Nicolaou, a senior scientific director at Novo Nordisk, posted on LinkedIn that the company has now joined Ligand-AI, a new project funded by the EU public-private partnership, Innovative Health Initiative (IHI).

In the post, he said the project’s goal is to generate high quality, large, open datasets of protein-ligand interactions for thousands of proteins. “In the spirit of open science collaboration, these datasets will be shared and used to implement models and methods to improve AI-driven drug discovery,” he said.

This latest partnership with OpenAI builds on technology partnerships it has with AWS, Microsoft, Google and Hugging Face, as well as its existing collaboration with OpenAI.

“This partnership is one important step in positioning Novo Nordisk to lead in the next era of healthcare,” said Mike Doustdar, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk. “There are millions of people living with obesity and diabetes who need treatment options, and we know there are therapies still waiting to be discovered that could change their lives.

“Integrating AI in our everyday work gives us the ability to analyse datasets at a scale that was previously impossible, identify patterns we could not see, and test hypotheses faster than ever. This means discovering new therapies and bringing them to market faster than ever before.”

OpenAI said it would be assisting Novo Nordisk in upskilling the company’s global workforce and enhancing AI literacy. Through the partnership OpenAI’s capabilities will also be used to improve efficiency in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution, and corporate operations. The company is starting pilot programmes across research and development, and manufacturing and commercial operations, with full integration by the end of 2026.