UK Health-AI Push: NVIDIA Partnerships Back Sovereign Models from Imaging to Drug Design

NVIDIA is working with UK universities, research centers, and technology companies on applying AI across life sciences, robotics, healthcare, and generative model development. These collaborations form part of the UK’s efforts to build sovereign AI — the capability to develop artificial intelligence using domestic infrastructure, data, workforce, and business networks. They align with the UK’s AI Action Opportunities Plan, which emphasizes building national AI infrastructure, driving adoption across sectors, and is built on the following key pillars:

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Image credit: NVIDIA

National AI Infrastructure and Health Models

The UK’s national supercomputer, Isambard-AI, launched in July at the University of Bristol with NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and UK Research and Innovation funding, is supporting research across healthcare, environment, and materials science. Current projects include:

• UK-LLM, a large language model from University College London, Bangor University, and NVIDIA, using Nemotron reasoning models to support English and Welsh for public service delivery, including healthcare and education.
• Nightingale AI, a multimodal health foundation model led by Imperial College London and trained on UK and US health data, designed for earlier diagnoses and personalized care.
• Ultrasound Foundation Model at Queen Mary University of London, developed for rheumatoid arthritis imaging and intended as a reproducible public AI model for medical imaging.
• Gen Model in Ego-Sensed World at the University of Bristol, training on visual data from over 900 participants to predict everyday interactions, with potential use in supporting independent living for dementia patients.

AI for Robotics and Physical Systems

NVIDIA’s UK robotics collaborations include projects with direct applications in healthcare. At the Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool, researchers are combining NVIDIA libraries with robot scientists powered by Jetson Orin Nano modules to test material and biomedical hypotheses in automated labs. The National Robotarium is applying NVIDIA frameworks to support startups and research in areas including medical robotics and assistive technologies. 

AI for Life Sciences

UK-based biotech and life sciences companies are applying NVIDIA’s platforms to computational biology and drug discovery:

• Basecamp Research is using its proprietary BaseData dataset, reportedly 10 times larger than comparable public sets, to build foundation models for programmable medicines.
• UK CEiRSI (Centre of Excellence for In-Silico Regulatory Science and Innovation) at the University of Manchester is developing digital twins of patient populations to test treatments in silico.
• Isomorphic Labs is building an AI drug design engine based on foundational models across therapeutic areas, drawing on research from DeepMind and advancements such as AlphaFold.
• Peptone is applying a physics-driven AI platform to target intrinsically disordered proteins, an historically hard-to-drug class of proteins.
• Latent Labs is developing Latent-X, a generative model for in silico therapeutic molecule design and testing.
• Relation Therapeutics integrates lab-in-the-loop experimentation with foundational AI for target discovery.
• Hologen AI, spun out of University College London and King’s College London, develops multi-modal generative AI models of disease biology, particularly the brain, to improve drug development and enable personalized interventions for neurological disorders.
• Oxford Nanopore provides DNA and RNA sequencing technologies for both research and clinical applications.

Agentic and Generative AI Applications

NVIDIA is also supporting UK startups building agentic and generative AI systems with potential impact in healthcare and biotech. ElevenLabs develops multilingual AI voice models that power accessibility tools, including support for people who have lost their voices. Speechmatics provides speech-to-text technology with multilingual coverage, enabling integration into clinical and research workflows. Synthesia offers an AI video platform that can generate training and communication content for healthcare and life sciences organizations.

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Topic: Tech Giants