US-based computer technology company NVIDIA is playing a key role in Japan’s Sovereign AI initiatives to integrate AI in all aspects of healthcare.
The country’s healthcare leaders are deploying AI-powered applications across drug discovery, genomic medicine, healthcare imaging and robotics.
The applications leverage domain-specific platforms such as NVIDIA BioNeMo, NVIDIA MONAI, NVIDIA Parabricks, and NVIDIA Holoscan.
They are powered by NVIDIA AI computing platforms, including the Tokyo-1 NVIDIA DGX supercomputer.
The AI tools, trained on country-specific data and local infrastructure, are said to address the challenges faced by Japan’s healthcare system.
The challenges include an ageing population, where 30% of them are 65 years or above, and a projected shortfall of nearly 500,000 healthcare workers by next year.
NVIDIA is advancing Japan’s pharmaceutical market with the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform, which includes a modular framework, NVIDIA NIM microservices, and BioNeMo Blueprints.
BioNeMo enables drug discovery researchers to develop and deploy AI models for generating biological intelligence from biomolecular data.
At the NVIDIA AI Summit Japan, TetraScience introduced its Lead Clone Assistant, leveraging BioNeMo to reduce biologic therapy development from weeks to hours.
Astellas leverages BioNeMo biomolecular AI models to advance its biologics research.
The country’s top pharma companies Astellas, Daiichi-Sankyo and Ono Pharmaceutical are using Tokyo-1 NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer to enhance drug discovery.
Tokyo-1 was built in collaboration with Xeureka, a subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsui & Co., to build AI models for drug discovery.
In genomics, Japan has adopted the NVIDIA Parabricks software suite to advance the secondary analysis of DNA and RNA data.
The University of Tokyo’s Human Genome Centre uses the software for a genome project targeting cancer research and precision medicine.
Showa University uses NVIDIA’s Holoscan platform for real-time AI for surgery and imaging, while Olympus and AI Medical Service develop AI-assisted diagnostic tools.
Furthermore, Fujifilm’s NURA centres use NVIDIA AI to enhance cancer and chronic disease screenings, and tools such as MONAI and NeMo for rapid and accurate diagnoses.
