LA JOLLA, CA— Artificial intelligence has already demonstrated great promise in many aspects of biomedical research, from accelerating scientific discovery to speeding the translation of biological insights into new therapies. Scripps Research today announced it has received a significant award of in-kind compute power from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation to advance the adoption of AI into biomedicine and help realize its potential. The grant, totaling more than 14 million hours of compute time, is provided through the Huang Foundation's partnership with CoreWeave using NVIDIA GPUs.
“This philanthropic investment from the Huang Foundation, which brings leading computing expertise and infrastructure, represents a significant commitment to advancing human health,” says Scripps Research professor Andrew Ward , who is helping lead the research efforts with the foundation. “Paired with Scripps’ world-class scientists and unique combination of foundational and translational research, we aim to shorten the journey from scientific breakthrough to something that can make a real difference for patients.”
Artificial intelligence holds significant potential for biomedical research and healthcare, but insights alone do not improve patient outcomes. With this new support, multiple Scripps Research scientists are deploying state-of-the-art computational power to transform how vaccines, antibody therapies and small molecule drugs are discovered. Across these different projects, the overarching goal is to advance AI from its initial promising demonstrations to reliable, widely usable tools.
“Some of medicine’s greatest opportunities lie in biology we have never been able to see clearly: how antibodies evolve to fight disease, and how proteins move to reveal hidden targets for new drugs. Scientists at Scripps are using AI at scale to simulate both, building a virtual model of how our immune system creates antibodies and a dynamic map of the human proteome. The Huang Foundation is providing compute to model this extraordinary complexity, and the resulting tools will be openly available for scientists everywhere searching for new medicines,” says Jensen Huang, Co-President of the Huang Foundation.
By providing access to more than 14 million hours of compute power, this award not only significantly compresses scientific timelines, it also enables Scripps Research scientists to think at a magnitude unimaginable just a few years ago. The novel, large-scale datasets generated at Scripps Research, which are the lifeblood for training next generation AI models, can now be fully leveraged to make quantum leaps across different scientific disciplines.
This includes Antibodies for All, led by Professor Bryan Briney , which aims to build a “Virtual Germinal Center”: an AI system that models how human antibodies mutate, bind their targets and are selected during an immune response. Trained on millions of paired antibody sequences and detailed structural data, the system will allow researchers to test candidate vaccines and search for therapeutic antibodies computationally before advancing the most promising options to experimental testing. The project has the potential to replace years of trial and error with faster, more informed design, improving our ability to quickly respond to emerging pathogens and effectively target diseases that remain difficult to treat.
The award also supports Professor Stefano Forli's team, which is working on the "dark" proteome: the thousands of human proteins whose dynamic behavior has resisted structural studies and kept them out of reach of drug development. By simulating them at scale under realistic physiological conditions, their system aims to capture how these molecules flex, breathe, fold and shift, revealing transient druggable pockets as they appear. Such an analysis at unprecedented scale can potentially unlock treatments for previously “undruggable” diseases.
Briney's and Forli’s teams will also leverage additional experimental data inputs from the labs of Ward; Christopher Parker, professor and The Abide-Vividion Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology; and Benjamin Cravatt, professor and the Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology. Together, these projects help position Scripps Research at the leading edge of computational biomedicine.
“We’ve already seen how AI learned to predict 3D structures from amino acid sequences alone,” Ward continues. “The foundation’s generous support will help usher in the next wave of AI: one where models can anticipate function, reveal druggable sites, and link molecular patterns in cells and tissues to underlying health conditions, among other exciting frontiers in biomedical research.”