Nvidia and Genentech make the case for AI-driven drug discovery at BIO2026

The biotech industry’s biggest annual gathering, BIO2026, ran June 22-25 in San Diego. Nvidia showed up with something to say.

Nvidia’s VP of Healthcare, Kimberly Powell, joined Genentech CEO Ashley Magargee on a panel that put AI infrastructure at the center of the conversation about medicine’s future.

A partnership built on biological data and raw compute

The Nvidia-Genentech collaboration is not new. The two companies formalized a multi-year partnership on November 21, 2023, built around a specific idea: Genentech brings proprietary biological datasets, Nvidia brings the computing muscle.

Genentech, which operates as part of the Roche Group, sits on an enormous library of biological and clinical data accumulated over decades of drug development. Nvidia brings its BioNeMo platform and DGX Cloud infrastructure to process and model that data at scale.

During the convention, Nvidia also launched the BioNeMo agent toolkit, announced on June 23, 2026. The toolkit is designed to bring generative AI and agent-based systems into life sciences research workflows.

BIO2026’s broader AI moment

Nvidia did not have the AI conversation at BIO2026 to itself. Eli Lilly, Microsoft, and Insilico Medicine all participated in AI-focused sessions at the convention.

Katie Couric also participated in the BIO2026 programming, giving the convention a broader public-facing dimension.

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