NVIDIA has signed Thermo Fisher and Eli Lilly to its BioNeMo platform, building it into shared AI infrastructure for drug discovery worldwide.1 Five specialized biotech platforms — Natera, Boltz Lab, Owkin, Edison Scientific and Basecamp Research — are launching on or alongside it.1
Pharma companies across multiple countries are restructuring around this AI-native model. Denmark's Novo Nordisk shut its internal cell therapy unit and licensed the program to AI firm Cellular Intelligence.1 Novo posted strong Q1 earnings and its stock rallied, a sign global investors are rewarding the shift from in-house biology to AI partnerships.1
Not every biotech IP holder is ceding ground. MindWalk Holdings Corp. is defending its foundational HYFT patent, EP3881326A1, with a new filing, EP26187897.9, covering a distinct layer built on top of it.1 "It is the computational layer built on the original foundation, not a re-filing of it," the company said.1
MindWalk's new patent covers how biological patterns get organized into meaning reusable across infrastructure, customer programs and AI workflows — sitting above foundation models like BioNeMo rather than competing with them.1
The pattern signals a market splitting into layers on both sides of the Atlantic. NVIDIA and its ecosystem partners are consolidating the computational substrate — models, compute and data pipelines — that pharma companies worldwide plug into. Legacy IP holders like MindWalk are racing to stake out the layers above it before that substrate becomes uncontested. Novo Nordisk's decision to license out an entire cell therapy program, rather than run it internally, is the clearest signal yet that drug discovery is shifting onto shared AI platforms instead of proprietary in-house R&D stacks — a trend now visible from US pharma to European biotech.
